Oathkeeper
by Melkor44
Summary: After the end, a demon looks back to simpler times. Before he was wrapped up in a profession of violence and death, he saved lives and united the disenfranchised. Before his history-changing assaults, he was just a boy who grew up in Konoha's slums. Before he lost his name to history, known only as the Demon, he was Naruto. (Disregards a fair amount of canon, and the timeline.)
1. A Memory of Times Gone By

**Do you ever have an idea for a new piece, after having just finished your previous one? That's what this feels like, since I took a year and a half to complete _Within the Straws I Grasp._ I'll be honest: I tried to give myself an outline here, but I still have no real clue where this is going. Making things up as I went along seemed to go pretty well for me before, so I'll give it another shot. Unfortunately for my sleep schedule, I'm possessed by a need to write. Will you love it? Will you hate it? Will you beg for more? Time to find out.**

 **Let's get this trainwreck moving.**

* * *

 _"Why?"_

 _It was a question that had haunted others' thoughts for years. From the time he'd made the actions that defined so many lives, least of all his own, it was the one thing he'd never been able to give a straight answer to. It was the one thing he'd never thought to ask himself._

 _"You have no concept of what it means to be a demon like me, do you?" He countered. "I may look like you do, but it's because I choose to. I speak in a way you understand, if only because doing otherwise would be pointless. I tried to convince myself that I was capable of acting human. Being human. I tried for so long that it almost erased my existence."_

 _"I wish it had. Look at what you've done!"_

 _"No form of governance is superior to any other. All political struggles are fronts to obtain personal power and leverage over others. It's something I've admired about humans, ever since I understood that I wasn't one of you: where demonic hierarchy is set on little more than strength, and the intelligence to wield it effectively, humans base their leadership on any number of superfluous categories. You're confusing, irritating to keep up with, and most of you drop like flies."_

 _"What right does that give you to kill indiscriminately?"_

 _The demon snorted in derision as his interrogator fumed._

 _"It was my right, because I felt like doing it. Even now, nothing but my amusement at your anger is keeping you alive."_

 _"Why shouldn't I be angry? You've destroyed the world! You've cast us back into the darkest ages of our history!"_

 _"And your suffering," the demon paused for a moment to lick his lips, "is delicious."_

 _"Argh! I've had it with you! Why won't you just die, and leave us be?"_

 _The sword was drawn. The sword came down. The sword was caught in the demon's jaws, before it broke against his teeth._

 _"Because of moments like that." He answered the question mockingly. "Where would I get my entertainment from, if you couldn't provide it? You, specifically, in a way. The prodigal son of your village, cast aside for crimes you committed to protect your loved ones...who hated you in turn. Years spent perfecting a craft you hated, destroying lives you wanted to build. Even now, the only reason I'm here is because you amuse me."_

 _"Just kill me, and get this over with." The interrogator demanded. "I'm not here to be used like a toy."_

 _"No, you're here because you were drawn to me. To what I represent. It's an unnerving thing, isn't it? I sit here, restrained from acting in anything but self-defense while you have this sealing circle around me, but you feel like the captive. I know the weight of all your sins, and I know the regrets you keep inside of yourself. In a way, it's like you're seeking...redemption."_

 _"I hate you."_

 _"No. You hate yourself." The demon replied._

 _He'd cut his way across the world, from the islands of Mizu no Kuni to the deserts of Kaze no Kuni. He'd killed his way through countless enemies, from the jagged mountain passes of Rai no Kuni and Iwa no Kuni to the lush forests of Hi no Kuni. He'd had help, but even then, he'd left them. He'd seen that they didn't need his presence to be effective anymore, even as they waited for the day he would come back to them. Instead, he tormented the man who'd been fundamental in his formation, and becoming the way he was._

 _"If you hated me," the demon continued, "you wouldn't hesitate to strike me down. Even though it may not seem like it, I'm not immortal. I have the scars to prove it. You don't understand me, and that makes you afraid. You hate yourself for your fear. You hate yourself for your_ weakness _, even as you try to convince others that you can be nothing but strong. You strive to be the best, and on falling short..."_

 _He gave a short chuckle, even as his captor's face took on a stern expression and set in a menacing frown._

 _"No. I hate you."_

 _"Don't lie to yourself...and don't lie to me. I can smell lies. Yours are a little less fragrant than others." The demon laughed to himself again._

 _"You broke the world, and everyone on it! You ruined everything that I sacrificed for!"_

 _"Humans destroyed this place long before I was given the chance to walk through its wastelands. Your way of life, all your bloodshed and pride, had set the stage. It was like a dish, left too far on the edge of the table, and barely holding on. All I did was give it a little push."_

 _"You bombed an entire country to smoke and rubble!"_

 _"And how many innocents died in your three wars? The vast majority of any nation is used for purposes besides housing. Most of what I destroyed was agriculture. Food my enemies needed to survive the winter. Food they didn't receive. Besides...do you think I'll say that I regret killing them? That I'm ashamed?"_

 _"I want something! Anything! Some part of emotion besides your smug self-assuredness! I don't care if it's anger, or hate, or_ anything _, as long as it keeps that fucking smile off your face!"_

 _The spit launched out from the demon's mouth and landed squarely on the cheek of the human he was tormenting, laughing more heartily than ever as he stared down to pay attention to the Fuinjutsu circle under him. Then, with a sudden burst of concentration that was fueled by his aggressor's momentary silence, he sat on the ground and carved in his own seal-work._

 _"You really are a one-track mind, aren't you?" He laughed. "All this impeccable writing to prevent me from attacking you, and a sealing formation that theoretically keeps me in place...but nothing written in the margins of the seal to prevent me from modifying it. Did you forget which art allowed me to become what I am?"_

 _Carved into the stone ground, in fine lettering that looked neat enough to come from a printing press, the demon wrote that he had the power to leave the circle. Immediately, there was a change in the air; after a pink glow rose up from the edges of the circle and died down, the demon stepped forward. Outside the circle, there were no laws he was forced to follow. Though his captor made a move to escape, he raised one arm, and grabbed the human's face._

 _"Relax, I won't kill you. You entertain me too much. But for a few great moments of joy, I'll sacrifice that amusement...by taking away your Ninjutsu."_

 _The dark energy of the demon's power radiated, flowing as directed by his will. Sharp pain connected their bodies, the human's tenketsu pierced and warped until nothing remained that could be activated. He hadn't taken the fool's chakra, vital as it was to living, but it would be impossible to access. No techniques, no seals, just raw power._

 _"One day, maybe, there will be someone strong enough to cleanse this world of my influence...but it's not you, and that day isn't today. I wonder, how long will you last now that you've become powerless? How long until the world knows you're weak, and kills you? Will you run away? Will you accept death? I look forward to watching you. But on the other hand...I don't think we'll meet again."_

 _The demon turned, walking out from the underground shelter unopposed. When he felt the sunlight warm his face again, falling through the tree-filled forest of his home country, his smile softened. He walked slowly, looking around at the scene stretching out before him. Birds sang and flitted about in the air, squirrels and an occasional rabbit bolting whenever he moved too close to them. This was the kind of thing he'd always envied: the natural world, without human ostentation to bend or break it. Deep scars marred the ground, a sign that he'd walked this path before. A sign that he'd battled here before. Had this been on his march to Kiri? Or to Kumo? It couldn't have been to many other places, save for the civilian settlements and minor villages tucked away in the space between those destinations._

 _They'd known what had hit them, but they hadn't been prepared for the overwhelming nature of his assault. Lifetimes of power, unlocked on a whim, that had signaled a change in his methodology; after he'd razed one enemy nation to the ground, there was no point in hiding himself anymore. After all, it wasn't that he'd become a demon...he'd been born on a battlefield, his progenitor's dying act to slaughter his predecessor. Demons could die, but their essence wouldn't disappear._

 _On the night Kurama, the Kyuubi no Kitsune, had been killed, Namikaze Naruto was stillborn. The demonic life had fled its mortal shackles, invading the body of the newborn who'd been steeped in its power during pregnancy. There had simply been too much power for the child to survive in the womb; that flooding of youki, on the other hand, allowed the Kyuubi to infest the infant's body without issue. The Yondaime Hokage hadn't known his dead son's fate, as he'd died a hero, but he had watched the boy open his eyes. His blood-red, bloodshot eyes, that craved death above all else._

 _How had it all come to this? As Naruto walked through the woods, intent on finding his way back to the allies he'd abandoned, he allowed his thoughts to wander._

* * *

It had been a long day. Working by himself, he'd managed to scope out his first target beyond the slums, a little ramen stand that looked like it was doing well enough for him to slip by unnoticed. In a world where jobs were a group undertaking, with successful heists operated in teams of three or four, Naruto had managed to survive for years as a lone wolf. He was just a little faster, just a little stealthier, just a little more observant, than the other street urchins who stalked the streets he was growing up on. He didn't come away with hauls as large as the other crews, but he was by himself, and he didn't need that much. Or, at least, he had _been_ by himself.

He wasn't entirely sure what had happened. One moment, everything had been fine, as he prepared to slip through the building's unsecured defenses to make off with whatever food he could eat raw. Without warning, the building had seen smoke rising from its roof as flames torched the windowpanes. Unwilling to let his food for the next two or three days go up in the fire, Naruto had made the executive decision to run headlong into the stand's backroom. There, he'd come face to face with a gruesome scene: a crying girl backed up into a corner, fire curling around the room as it shambled towards her, and an older man on the ground with several racks of shelving collapsed on top of him.

Naruto was far from heroic, or even sympathetic, but something nagged at him. Barreling through the blaze that threatened to consume the building, along with the unconscious man inside it, he grabbed the girl. With one hand around her waist, he held her close and pulled her towards the exit. It had been difficult, given that she'd chosen not to move.

She still wasn't moving. Naruto had propped her up in the corner of "his" alleyway, but even her eyes seemed distant, like she was viewing her life from an outside perspective. He'd outdone himself, multiple boxes of packaged food holding together in the back of a dumpster that nobody else ever used. He stared her down as she refused to blink, never looking away as her brain did its best to reconcile her to the situation she found herself in. She wasn't crying, wasn't speaking, and it was only the shallow rise-and-fall of her ribs that told him she was still alive.

"Hope you appreciate this, one day." Naruto said, the high pitch of his eight-year-old voice softened by his low volume.

The girl looked like she was his age; maybe older, maybe not. Soft brown hair fell down from her scalp, with bangs that fell down to the middle of her face and the rest of her hair swept into a ponytail. Somehow, she'd managed to avoid getting burns as they'd rushed out from the fire, her peach-tanned skin still perfect. And as Naruto looked in her eyes, innocent brown eyes that didn't know until today that life could be so cruel...he looked at her, and felt remorse. She looked at him, and she felt awe.

She looked at him, and took in the bloodshot red of her savior. The air around him felt unnaturally warm, against the cold stone of the allley's walls and floor. She felt more at peace, when she focused on his eyes.

"What's your name?" Naruto asked.

"Ayame." She answered. "Ichiraku Ayame."

"Well, Ayame," he rolled her name around in his head, deciding it was a nice name, "starting right now, I'm your Banchou. You do what I tell you, you make sure that I'm safe on my jobs, and I'll protect you. I'll make sure you have enough to eat."

Naruto's ears picked up the sound of movement, and he shuffled next to Ayame as he crouched to hide behind the cover of the dumpster. His eyes strained in the direction of the footfall, as though he could magically see through the metal box and concrete walls.

"Stay here." He whispered, his blond hair tickling across the bridge of Ayame's nose.

 _Step-step, step-tap-step,_ so close together that they were almost indistinguishable, but Naruto had learned to differentiate between the number of people moving together in a group. Two people, one of them with a cane. As they passed by the alleyway, and continued moving, Naruto felt an unswerving feeling rise up inside of him. Was it curiosity? Destiny? An attempt to find an easy mark?

He didn't know.

Do you really think we should be talking about this in the open?" A man's voice emanated from outside of the alley, in the main road.

"That's why we're here, instead of a place where the walls have eyes and ears. Even if we're overheard by some vagrant brat, what good will it do them? Nobody who's worth anything comes through these streets. Not anymore, anyway."

As quietly as he could, Naruto crept after them. He hated to leave Ayame unattended, but hopefully, she wouldn't be moving for a little while. If she couldn't follow his instructions, then he wouldn't let her work with him. He hated to think that he'd need to cut her loose, after she'd just lost her livelihood and her father, but the first rule of living in the slums was, "C.Y.A.": _Cover Your Ass._

"Even so...these aren't things that will leave you in the good graces of the people you've fought beside for the last forty years. Especially your teammates. Genocide? Human experimentation? I'm not certain that-"

"Sensei, please." A man with white skin, so ashen that it seemed painted-on rather than natural, said those words to interrupt the other's speech.

The man he was walking with was somewhat shorter, old age having begun to take its toll as the years continued to pile upon his body. His cane let out a soft tapping sound as it struck the sun-warmed stone of the road beneath his feet.

"The Uchiha are restless. Itachi's high rise in power is bolstering them, but I doubt he would betray the village. That having been said, it would be too cruel to ask him to carry out the assassination of his entire clan." The taller of the pair continued.

"Given the Hyuuga incident, earlier this year, you can't possibly think that it would be appropriate to do something like that! Especially not after the Kyuubi attacked, and Minato killed it, allowing us to live in peace at the cost of his own life!" The elderly man was outraged.

"Every day we wait is another day for their confidence to be bolstered." The white-skinned man replied.

Naruto heard it all, watched it all. Whether they could feel his eyes on them, or they were blissfully unaware, was of little consequence; after all, the white-skinned man had been right. What _could_ Naruto do?

Nothing.

That was what a child like him could do around these adults who were talking about deaths and incidents and whatever a Kyuubi was. These were shinobi. Ninja. In the world they lived in, people like that were at the very top of the chain...and people like Naruto were at the very bottom. Even if he managed to unite every single street rat in Konoha's slums, he'd still have less power, in the world outside of that kingdom, than a single adult. Adults, however, had to acquiesce to the wishes of any ninja. Every ninja had to obey the laws set forth by the Hokage.

"You aren't going to be dissuaded by me, are you? It's almost like I'm talking to Jiraiya." The old man said.

"If I'm hated for saving this village by any means necessary, for the rest of my life, then I'l accept their hate. The children will be spared."

"And your...experiments? You said?"

"No worse than what Danzo has done with the Ne program."

Naruto had no idea what these two were talking about, but he knew a lie when he heard one. In fact, that might have been the worst lie he'd ever heard in his life. And yet, the old man seemed to believe it. That, or he didn't care. Naruto didn't know which of those options was worse, even if they were master and student.

"Say...do you feel like it's gotten colder, all of a sudden?" The old man asked, shivering slightly. "Perhaps we should head back to more...civilized...society."

The white-skinned man nodded, and both men raised their right arms in front of them before disappearing. Naruto hadn't been able to see what they did, but _that_ was cool. He'd be starting late, but a display like that sealed it: he wanted to become a ninja. What else was waiting for him, in this world of violence and theft? Ninja were the ones with power, and while he'd known that in the back of his mind, he hadn't understood their superhuman talents.

Of course, he didn't know that fast short-range movement with the _shunshin_ was barely scratching the surface of the metaphorical iceberg, but sometimes surprises could be fantastic. That was going to be one of them.


	2. To Know From Whence You Came

**On to chapter two! I figured I would give an oft-maligned, one-and-done character some of the spotlight. Come on, the characterization of villains is practically my trademark after the way _Within the Straws I Grasp_ went. You know I had to do it to 'em.**

 **Review responses:**

 **1\. thor94 & Just-Another-Reader-1: I PM'd both of you, but I figured I'd answer publicly as well to clear up any misconceptions that non-reviewers had. Kurama is dead, gone, disappeared into the wasteland of yesteryear. Naruto is himself, just...not the Naruto that canon knew.**

 **2\. BeniKaze: I actually went through three 4K+ drafts before I finally got down what I wanted the first chapter to have. I wanted to give things away, wanted to keep them hidden, wanted knowledge about the future juxtaposed against the past...the whole nine yards. Finally made it work to my liking. Glad you enjoyed it!**

 **3\. MetalRasenganBijuuLord: We've become ride-or-die now, huh? Fine by me, brother. This hopefully won't get nearly as convoluted towards its end as** **but I'm glad you're along for the ride.**

 **4\. OneLunchMan: One wreck right after another, and you can't look away, can you? Glad to know you're still alive out there, buddy. I swear, I'll get promoted to railroad manager one of these days.**

 **Let's get this trainwreck moving.**

* * *

"Naruto, you're not going to get anywhere if you don't pay attention in class." Mizuki, a silver-haired Chunin who taught at the academy, said. The blond boy sitting at a desk in front of him looked up, annoyance and mild disrespect evident in the slant of his eyes as he watched his teacher.

"Don't wanna learn outta books. Can't hardly read 'em anyways." Naruto said, speaking with the slow drawl he'd picked up in the slums. "I wanna learn jutsu, an' how to fight. It's been three years since I started classes, an' all I've learned is stuff that just don't matter. Plus, I'm the oldest in my class, an' it's almost no fun sluggin' the tar outta those little kids."

"I swear, if you don't drop that god-awful accent, I'll boot you off the Hokage Monument myself." Mizuki threatened jokingly.

Naruto raised an eyebrow at those words. He would remember that. Some revenge, a good old-fashioned prank or two, would be in order down the road. He'd taken great efforts to conceal his origins and status as a street urchin, though nothing could be done about the small cuts and holes that continued to appear in the clothing he'd stolen. Eventually, he'd be found out, but not yet. He doubted that his physical condition had gone entirely unnoticed, given that the adult shinobi who taught his classes were...

...well, they were adults, and shinobi. Naruto was by no means a genius, owed in part to his lack of an educated upbringing, but he knew there was only so much that he could pull over on them.

"Yeah, fine. Really, though, can you cut me some slack, Teach? You've seen me spar! I'm the best in the class at throwing kunai and shuriken!"

"You sure are!" Mizuki complimented his student. "But you're also still just a kid in the academy. You're in the third-year class, and we don't start teaching jutsu until the fifth-year class, because not everybody develops the control over their chakra necessary to use Ninjutsu at an early age."

There was no way Naruto had the knowledge, or access thereof, to know that was a lie. All the same, though, something had changed in the air; Naruto's face rankled in momentary disgust, his nostrils taking in the scent of wet peanut butter, and he _knew_ Mizuki was lying. On top of that, he was two years older than his class, and that went in accordance to Mizuki's own logic.

"Hey, Teach. Let's make a deal."

A chill ran up Mizuki's spine, the temperature in the room dropping fifteen degrees as Naruto's blood-red eyes tried their hardest to pierce their way into his soul. Every instinct in the Chunin's body was screaming at him to deny the boy, to tell him no, to refuse him...and yet, the words that fell out of his mouth told a different story.

"What do you mean?" He asked.

"If I pass my tests for my midterms and my finals, you have to teach me a jutsu for each one I do well on. You give me an incentive, and I'll make your teaching record look better."

He held out his hand, and Mizuki hesitated before reaching out and shaking it. Amid the sudden chill of the room, Naruto practically seemed like a furnace, his skin nearly burning Mizuki's hand. As he let go, he looked to his skin, and a faint, "IX," was marked on the skin between his middle and ring fingers. Blood dripped down from Naruto's palm, though he showed no concern.

"You really need to work on that one-track mind, Naruto...but if you want to play ball, then Mizuki-sensei can play ball. You've got a deal."

The warmth returned to the world in what seemed like a millisecond, as Naruto's lips parted to reveal his teeth with laughter. Mizuki didn't know it at the time, but the sight of Naruto's smile in that moment would haunt his dreams until the day that he died.

"Awesome! Thanks, Teach! I'll remember this, and _totally_ won't prank you now! Not on purpose!"

The boy's grateful exclamations, and the way he perked up, almost managed to push Mizuki's concerns to the back of his mind. All the same, he couldn't escape the sinking sensation that he'd made a mistake. Still...a deal was a deal, and with the physical prowess Naruto was showing, he'd make a good ninja. He'd have to mention it the next time his informant was in town. Something about the way he left the room on edge, every time he walked in, reminded him of the few times he'd seen Orochimaru in person.

After the famed White Snake had slaughtered the Uchiha clan's adults single-handedly, leaving only the handful of children as survivors, he'd vanished into the night and been labeled as a nukenin. No explanation had been given for the wanton violence, and there would be no closure for the orphans on whose shoulders the future rested. It had been a kiss of death to the village, especially after having lost the Hyuuga heiress to a Kumo kidnapping after peace talks had masked their intent. Mizuki had taught the lost girl's older cousin, and the event had clearly left its mark on him: Hyuuga Neji's driving force in life was the motivation to slaughter Kumo's ninja for their transgression.

That wasn't particularly uncommon over the last few years, though. While a ceasefire was technically in effect between the two villages, there would be no peace, and conventional processes were out the window. Normally, even if villages were on rocky terms with one another, squadrons passing by would leave the other be. Quietly, without the knowledge of the general populace, the Hokage had put out a kill-on-sight order for any and all Kumo-nin found in the field. Even Iwa, after the end of the Third Great War, had been given more courtesy. Still, it had made Orochimaru happy. Now, if shinobi from Kumogakure went missing, it went unquestioned as Konoha's doing. His laboratories, dotted across the landscape, were partially filled with soldiers from Kaminari no Kuni.

Still, he'd want to hear about this boy.

"Hey, Naruto. You're an orphan, right?" Mizuki asked.

"Yeah. Parents died in the Kyuubi attack, I guess? I was a newborn. Probably. Don't really know, never met them. Whole 'no last name,' and all."

Naruto wasn't much of a scholar, but something about the raw carnage of that night's story had sucked him in. The imagery of a gigantic demon lord striding across a battlefield, laying waste to civilization with nigh impunity, was attractive in a morbid sense. Then, of course, there was the fact that the Yondaime Hokage had actually been strong enough to kill a creature whose title had become synonymous with the phrase, "natural disaster." In the decade since, relative peace had fallen across the world on a geographic scale. Temperatures had been moderate, harvests had been bountiful, and there had been fewer monsoons than in years before. Mankind, on the other hand, had picked up the slack in regard to violence and death.

Covertly, of course.

"You know, there's a service we started offering because of that night. If someone going through the ninja academy is an orphan, we take a blood sample. Since we keep records of the blood samples of every single ninja who's ever served Konoha, we can compare them until we find at least one match. We almost always figure out both of them, but sometimes all we have is the mother. If they had anything for you to inherit, whether it was a house, or money, or techniques, then it would legally be yours."

"You'd do that?" Naruto asked, genuinely surprised. "Why?"

"You're not the only one who lost family that night. Almost everybody lost _someone_ they loved. And we all lost the Yondaime Hokage...I wonder how much differently our lives would be today, if he'd lived? Consider it a gift, from one orphan to another. At least I got to know my parents, though. You've got nothing. Don't they say that knowledge is the greatest gift that can be given?"

Mizuki's smile didn't falter, a coy grin that would have spoken volumes to a more experienced ninja in the room. Of course, it _was_ as legitimate procedure, but generally, it was done within the first month of the entry-level class. The results were kept secret until graduation, half of the time. If he sunk his claws in early, though...there was no telling how he could affect the boy's life. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, this trail would lead nowhere. And yet, Mizuki couldn't help feeling confident that he was on to something.

"We can even do it today, if you want. I can send a clone ahead with a message." The silver-haired Chunin said.

"Will it take long?" Naruto asked.

Quietly, Mizuki wondered to himself why an orphan would be pressed for time when he had no home to get back to, but he kept that thought to himself.

"It won't take long to draw the blood sample, maybe a couple minutes. They'll take two, one to search the men's records and one to search the women's records. The record-searching can take a few days, but I'll let you know when results come in!"

"Alright, let's do it."

As they walked out of the room together, the last to leave the class on a cool and cloudy day, the stone walls felt a little warmer as Naruto passed by them. Somewhere out there, an answer was waiting for the question he'd asked so many times: _who were his parents?_

The pair wandered through Konoha's streets, and Naruto realized offhandedly that Mizuki hadn't been joking about being an orphan raised by the streets. He weaved through the crowd, across alleys and intersections, as he moved towards his destination. It was a tactic to throw off pursuit, and a good way to familiarize himself with Konoha's metropolitan streets. In short order, they'd arrived at the doors of a building Naruto didn't recognize, and hadn't seen. Mizuki walked inside, turning after the door opened to reveal a somewhat shocked expression. Then, Naruto heard footsteps behind him, and he turned to see another Mizuki behind him.

"Naruto? When did you get ahead of me? I...how did you catch up to my clone? I thought I'd lost you for a second, and I got worried. If I wasn't able to sense your chakra, I'd have started panicking."

"I thought that was the real you. When did you switch with the clone?" Naruto asked.

"That's not...you know what? Let's just get inside. The faster we do this, the faster we can get the results." Mizuki said.

They walked up to the door, opening it and moving forward.

"Hey, Nikki, I'm here about the parentage bloodwork!" Mizuki called out, waiting for an answer.

Instead of getting a yell back, a tall woman strode out from another room to stare pointedly at him. Her hair was an electric blue, cut off at the middle of her neck with bangs that fell all the way to her eyebrows. Just below those were a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, and she looked as if she was attempting to magnify her disdain for Mizuki through them.

"Man, Teach, what'd you screw up to get _her_ mad at you?" Naruto asked.

"I saved her life on a mission and I'm calling in a favor. People don't like it when you call in favors." Mizuki said confidently.

"That's not what happened." Nikki countered, her voice a deep velvet that Naruto felt like he could get lost in if he allowed himself to. "You ruined my plan, almost got us all killed, and then saved your own ass!"

"The eye of the beholder, dear."

"I'll show _you_ something to behold, you weaselly, no-good, fourth-rate punk! Why, I oughtta-"

"Child! There is a child!" Mizuki said, pointing in Naruto's direction.

"No, no, keep going. I want to see where this leads." Naruto grinned, raising his eyebrows in quick succession.

"It leads to a very shallow grave, for me, if we don't get back on track!" Mizuki said in fear. It was lear that he was joking, but Naruto wasn't sure _just_ how much of it was sarcasm.

"Relax, Mizuki. I won't do anything to you while we're still inside the village walls. Nothing that's not consensual, anyway." She winked at the Chunin. "Since this is part of my job, you can keep that favor...for now. The Hokage was also generous enough to personally fund us with better computers for analysis, after the council turned the department down. The search might be done in as little as fifteen minutes."

Mizuki raised an eye at that.

"Ready to get started?" Nikki pointed the question to the blond boy on Mizuki's right, not knowing his name.

"I'm Naruto. Yeah, I'm ready." Naruto walked forward. "Let's get this show on the road."

"Mizuki, do you mind waiting out here? Safety reasons. I trust you, but...procedure, you know?"

Mizuki nodded, taking a seat at a nearby couch and picking up the first magazine in reach.

 _Kunoichi Weekly._ Nope.

 _CFL Insiders._ Better. The Screaming Eagles of Kyouzu, further out in Hi no Kuni, were set to play the Stone Patriots from Tsuchi no Kuni in the Super Bowl in a week and a half. It was the culmination of the Continental Football League's world, and most people were a little turned away from the game because both teams were known for obnoxious fans. This magazine said that the Stone Patriots were supposed to win by a double-digit lead, but Mizuki had some doubt about that.

"Holy shit, that's a big needle." He heard Naruto say from the other room.

This magazine had everything. Stat spreads, information tidbits...this was a rematch of the championship game thirteen years ago, when the Stone Patriots had denied the Screaming Eagles a win. They were out for revenge now, no doubt about it; if it wasn't a bloodbath, then there was no way the game wasn't rigged.

"You know what, if they're gonna malign the Eagles this much, I'll go the opposite direction." He said out loud, to himself. "McCloud and Gram will both pull a pick-six, Cahks will get a strip-sack. Eagles by a landslide, forty-three to nine."

It absolutely wasn't going to happen, not like that, but it was fun to be a wishful thinker. Still, he wanted to believe. Bring the trophy back to a town in Hi no Kuni for the first time in a while. Besides, everybody liked a good underdog story, right? And the Screaming Eagles, apparently, fed off of the disrespect they continued to be given.

"Hey, Teach, we're ready to..." Naruto trailed off, having re-entered the room.

"Men and their sports. The Eagles are his team, I guess? We can watch the search go ourselves." Nikki said. "I put it in the machine back there, so now we're going to wait for it here. I've set it to only search though the names of people killed during the Kyuubi attack."

* * *

 **ANALYZING D.N.A.**

 **H: BLONDE, RED RECESSIVE  
E: BLUE  
SP: LIGHT  
**

 **POSSIBLE FATHERS: YAMANAKA, HARUNO, HYUUGA, INUZUKA, NAMIKAZE, AKIMICHI, JIE  
POSSIBLE MOTHERS: YAMANAKA, UCHIHA, INUZUKA, ABURAME, AKIMICHI, NARA, UZUMAKI, SARUTOBI**

 **SEARCH MANUALLY? Y/N  
_**

* * *

"No way." Nikki said. "No _fucking_ way."

She looked at Naruto, and then looked out to the Hokage Monument. Back to Naruto. Back to the monument. In brackets, she typed to manually search for the combination of a Namikaze father and an Uzumaki mother. On-screen, images of the Yondaime Hokage and his wife were pulled up. On the bottom of the screen, a small red bar noted the process of the analysis. If it went quickly, then it meant that there was no match.

The bar was barely moving as it went across the screen, and the blue-haired scientist watched in horrified fascination. After five minutes, it hit the fifty percent mark: the sign that there was at least one parental match. Slowly, and then with a quick sort of mechanical certainty, the bar moved to a complete hundred percent. Twin check marks in the boxes below the couple's pictures.

"MIZUKI!" Nikki yelled. "GET THE HOKAGE, _NOW_!"

Mizuki was shocked into action, the magazine falling from his hands as he bolted faster than either of the room's other occupants could watch. Sooner than Nikki would have thought possible, since she knew just how far the Hokage Tower was from her department's office, Mizuki had returned with the Hokage in tow.

"I, ah...what seems to be the matter, Nikki?" Hiruzen Sarutobi was by no means a tall man, hunched over with his cane in hand, but he was still the Hokage.

"We'd have needed to call for you regardless, because we just got through with a parentage test for Naruto here, but...you're not going to believe this."

"He's...oh, gods." Mizuki said as he and the Hokage looked at the screen. "Are you sure it didn't screw up?"

"These computers are practically brand new. They don't make mistakes. Those names have never popped up on the screen, no matter how much testing we did. Naruto?"

"Yes?"

"You're the son of the Yondaime Hokage."

Naruto drew his head back, eyes widening in shock.

"I'm WHAT?"

A brotherhood was created in that room, of four people who were all bound together by their shock and disbelief at the revelation of Naruto's parentage.


	3. The Illusory Horizon

**Back again, a week later, it's time for another chapter! Who dem boiz? We dem boiz. Who's gonna win the Super Bowl tomorrow? Hopefully my Eagles up in Philly. Need that ring. Honestly, though, we all know the real winners are the cammercials...usually. Except for party monkey baby. That was horrendous. Enough of my rambling, though.**

 **Review response time!**

 **1\. SlyUzumakiVii: Well, if you knew a couple's child was stillborn, the couple dies, and then ten years later suddenly they're not dead, and you've had literally no contact with them...I mean, I feel like that would come as a shock. Just a little bit. Right?**

 **2\. MetalRasenganBijuuLord: Well, Naruto's never been associated with law & order. Just depends on how early or late the gate breaks down.**

 **Let's get this trainwreck moving.**

* * *

"Naruto, do you really think it's wise to allow so many people to run in and out of your home?" Sarutobi Hiruzen asked. "Three, five, ten children at a time, always different ones. It feels impossible to keep track of. Why do you let them come and go as they please?"

The Sandaime Hokage sat in Naruto's kitchen, across from the blond at a wooden table. One such rush of children, not all of them younger than Naruto himself, had just left through the front door of the estate.

"I'm the Banchou. They answer to me, because I run their streets. Or, at least, they answer to me." Naruto said. "When they work in five-man crews, it takes a bit of extra effort, but the division of work allows for jobs to be executed more safely. They were all thrown out of orphanages, or left behind by their families. There's no one around who can provide the life they want, or need...so they do the next best thing, and through guidance, they manage."

" _You're_ the Banchou? The one who's supposed to be responsible for any number of heists over the last three years?" Hiruzen was flabbergasted.

A _child_ was the most sought-after petty criminal in Konoha? Even with three years of ninja training, and an impressive genetic pedigree, that just felt...incorrect. Naruto wasn't someone who told outright lies, though, as far as he knew. It was better just to accept the words at face value.

"Key words there are, 'supposed to be.' I haven't lifted a finger since last year. I kind of miss it."

"And what am I supposed to do with that knowledge, as Hokage?" Hiruzen asked.

"If you're going to do anything," Naruto countered, "then you should provide for those children so that they don't have to steal to survive. They don't have to be ninja, not everybody is cut out for that life, but they could be tradesmen. They could have skills that allow them to survive in the society we live in."

Hiruzen was a little shocked at that proclamation.

"Test them and see if they belong to clans, like I was tested. Honestly, they're so adept at working together and moving unseen, _not_ becoming ninja might be a bigger waste of talent. And beyond all that...what did you come here to talk to me about, today? It's a Saturday."

"I know you enjoy days off from school, Naruto, but that's exactly why I had to come today. Away from eyes that might be prying." Hiruzen said gravely.

Immediately, Naruto's posture shifted at that tone of voice. He sat up straight, his hands bridged with one another on the table before him. Looking the old man dead in the eye, he forced the Hokage to consciously acknowledge his seriousness.

"Go on." He said. Hiruzen made a few hand seals, performing a jutsu Naruto didn't know, before continuing.

"Mizuki is a traitor to the village. He works for my former student, Orochimaru."

"The one who committed the Uchiha Massacre." Naruto said, memories of the day he'd rescued Ayame coming back to the surface of his mind.

"Yes." The Hokage confirmed. "Fittingly enough, he has a summoning contract with snakes. Mizuki was seen talking to one. Ordinarily, this would be grounds for a mental fitness check to continue to serve the village, but the snake talked back."

Naruto stared blankly.

"Animal clans with summoning contracts are effectively the gods of the natural world. They do what they want." Hiruzen tried to convince the boy across the table of his words.

"What's the rest of your story?" Naruto asked.

"You're going to be long-term bait to catch him in the act of betrayal. Even though we _know_ he's a in league with a traitor, because we've _seen_ him talking to a summoned animal that would reasonably only belong to Orochimaru, we have no proof of any information he's actually passed on."

Naruto raised an eyebrow at that.

"You're the Hokage. Do you even _need_ any proof? All you have to do is order it, and it'll happen. What's stopping you?"

"The line between a military dictatorship and a despotic tyranny is whether the person in charge abuses their power." Hiruzen answered the question. "Certainly, if I ordered it, the Anbu would drag him away in the night...but people would ask questions, and rumors would start. It's a matter of ethics. Despite the fact that we're in a constant state of war, we still make our attempts to be humane. There's rules of engagement, and there are laws in society. If you can't follow them, no matter your station, then eventually people will set aside their enmity for long enough to defeat you."

"You're worried a coup would be staged if you imprisoned or murdered a traitor? That's ridiculous." Naruto was incredulous.

"I didn't reach this age by acting reckless. Think about how many elderly ninja you've seen, Naruto. Civilians are relatively likely to live out their lives to their fullest extent, but shinobi murder one another on a near-daily basis. The difference between them, and me, is that I don't make gambles I can't afford to lose."

There was a cold, unflinching steel in Hiruzen's eyes. Naruto stared at the Hokage's face, and he felt a kind of respect that he'd reserved for his peers swell up inside of him. Every scar on the old man's hands and arms, the off-color line that cut from his left ear to the middle of his cheek...they were the trophies of a man who'd pulled himself up from the gutters of the world. He'd watched the failures of those around him, learned from them, and made mistakes of his own.

"And that brings us back around to the beginning." Naruto said. "What does this have to do with me?"

"I want you to be the bait." Hiruzen said, wasting no time.

Naruto appreciated the frank side of the Hokage.

"How?"

"In four years, you're going to intentionally fail your graduation exam. I'll inform the proctor of tests. You're in a class that contains most of the long-standing clans' heirs-to-be, and I imagine Mizuki's plot has something to do with them. He's also stayed close to you, likely for the same reason...especially after finding out who you are. Whatever plan it is that he comes up with afterwards, to get you to graduate from the academy, go along with it. Then, at the end of it all, we'll spring the trap when he's with you."

"That seems awfully contrived." Naruto said. "How do you know he'll try to get me to graduate anyway?"

"He's shown you _incredibly_ special consideration. He's giving you preferential treatment, even more than the clans' children. Don't think I don't know that he's been teaching you Ninjutsu behind everyone's backs." Hiruzen said.

"In his defense, they've all been basic E-ranked techniques. More theory than anything. Like, what way to rotate my chakra, and all that. Lowering my chakra consumption to increase the amount of time that I can practice...but I still can't seem to get doppelgangers down." Naruto frowned at that last admission.

"Realistically, you wouldn't use them much anyway. Of the basic techniques that the academy teaches, the _kawarimi_ and the _shunshin_ are easily the more useful ones. Still, it may simply be a matter of solidity? Clones, at least the basic _bunshin,_ are empty shells of chakra that border on being a Genjutsu. There are elemental variations, and the solid _Kage Bunshin,_ that can actually mete out damage to the opponent. Once, a former student of mine even raised the idea of a clone comprised of nothing but raw chakra, with hardly any form to it...which is essentially a bomb. Still, don't worry too much if you can't completely grasp the basic _bunshin._ You have four years to keep practicing."

"I will. Thanks for the words of confidence." Naruto replied.

"Any time, Naruto. Now...I think it's about time that these old bones of mine made their way back to my office. Or, maybe, my home? I guess we'll see. Maybe I'll put someone else in charge of finding the Banchou. He's proved pretty elusive so far."

With that, Hiruzen stood, taking two steps before his _shunshin_ took him out of the house. It left Naruto side-eyeing the door, and then staring disinterestedly at the seat that the Hokage had been occupying seconds ago. He'd been interested for a while, but he didn't particularly care if Mizuki had some grand scheme going on in the background. That was the Hokage's business to deal with. Still...if an opportunity presented itself, he resolved, then he would take it. Not because he'd been asked to. It was because there would be a reward, for so little risk, that he couldn't realistically refuse. Hopefully.

Standing up, he left the kitchen to walk across the floor of the house. He moved through the living room, and then down the hallway where his room was separated from Ayame's...not because he held any particular feelings for her; she was his second-in-command, and effectively his protege. Without missing a beat, he stripped out of his clean clothes before moving to a drawer that had his "work" clothes. A shredded black shirt, almost completely faded to orange and brown, paired with jeans that had more rips in them than he could count. In moments, he was dressed, and ready to go.

"Ayame!" He called. "I'm leaving. I'll be back later."

A muffled acknowledgement came from the distance, and as Naruto stared at himself in the mirror, he was a little taken aback by how little things had changed. Certainly, there was no _reason_ for him to do what he was preparing for, but it was what he knew. It was what he was good at. Red eyes, with blood vessels on prominent visible display, reflected in the mirror. Rough hands, well-suited to his future as a shinobi...with deft fingers, necessary for the task at hand.

He'd played the part of a model young boy for just over a year. The itch in the back of his mind had gotten too big to avoid scratching, no disguise adherent enough to avoid breaking his newfound reputation as a good citizen. Plain and simple, he'd been out of the game for too long. It was bad, it was wrong, and it was unnecessary.

Maybe that's what made it fun?

* * *

"So you pull your chakra up from your feet, and then you step. That's the _shunshin._ Like this." Naruto demonstrated the technique, walking out from one side of the room, vanishing before reappearing with his nose nearly touching the opposite wall.

Ayame closed her eyes in focus for a moment, feeling energy rise from the bottom of her body. Without warning, she arrived at Naruto's side, touching shoulders with him. Stepping back in shock from the contact, Naruto squinted a little bit as he looked at Ayame.

"Really? On your first freaking try?" He asked, annoyed at how easily she'd gotten it.

"Maybe I'm just better than you?" Ayame teased playfully.

"Yeah, well, how about the _kawarimi,_ where you switch places with something? You make this hand seal, concentrate your chakra in your joints, and then you move your chakra in a cycle. Like a pulley. Try...that chair?" Naruto pointed at a desk chair that had been pulled away from its table, for this express purpose.

Once again, Ayame closed her eyes, letting her chakra flow into the sockets of her shoulders, knees, ankles, elbows, and her fingers. She made the half-Ram seal, and in a puff of smoke, she'd switched places with the chair.

"Dammit." Naruto cursed. "How come you get it easier?"

"Well, aren't these the easy techniques?" Ayame asked. "They're meant for beginners like us."Still, this is...this is nice. It's fun. I do feel a little tired, though."

"The amount of chakra you can make isn't very big when you first start. That makes it easier to control, though." Naruto said, now understanding why she was grasping the basics so easily.

Mizuki had been relatively blatant in letting Naruto know that his chakra reserves were monstrous. Reportedly, everyone on his mother's side of the family was renowned for having powerful chakra, and lots of it. Or, at least, they were when they'd still been alive. The entire Uzumaki clan, except for his mother and the wife of the Shodaime Hokage, had been massacred at the end of the Second Great War. Of course, historical records also said that he'd been pronounced dead at birth, so he took the concept of fulfilled genocide with a grain of salt. Still, it was a little ironic that his high chakra capacity was going to be a major hindrance before it could be helpful.

"Makes sense. How do you get it to increase?" Ayame said, looking a little winded.

"Physical training, and a lot of practice. Supposedly."

"I would prefer not to." Ayame frowned. She didn't mind physical work, but she wasn't looking to become a muscle-bound ogre of a woman.

"Suit yourself." Naruto grinned. "Whatever it takes...I'll get stronger."

"I believe you." Ayame said, looking at the blond boy with a mix of seriousness and apprehension.

While her worldview was admittedly small, especially after the death of her father, Naruto was the most capable person she knew. Certainly, there was the Hokage, but she wasn't privy to the inner workings of the ninja caste. Naruto was the oldest and strongest of the scrape- and cut-covered bottom-feeders that they had lived among, and that made him the leader. He'd fought his way to being the leader, too. Ayame tried not to think about that. Certainly, there weren't many that would miss those few dissenters, and he hadn't meant to...but...

"What are you going to do with all of this? The training, the jutsu? All of them look up to you. Once you become a ninja, what happens to the group?"

"We're not just 'a group.'" Naruto countered. "We're family. This village can take my blood, they can take my time, they can take my life...but they won't take my brothers and sisters away from me. The Hokage won't pull them into the shinobi academy, but he won't go after them because it would mean going after the son of the Yondaime Hokage. He's not willing to commit political suicide on that scale, even if he _is_ planning something."

Naruto wouldn't put it past the Sandaime Hokage to have something on the back burners of his mind. Even so, he'd done a little more than simply pay attention in class. Extracurricular reading had taken up more than a little bit of his free time.

"But...what direction are we headed?"

Naruto was silent for a moment, at that question. Mouth closed in studious thought, he stared at Ayame; the brunette didn't break eye contact, though he couldn't tell whether it was out of respect, fear, or patience.

"An army." Naruto said out loud, and Ayame felt like she was frozen in place.

"You're serious?" She asked.

"What other option do I have? Either we go our separate ways, or I take what I know and teach them, with every spare moment I have. If they steal for me, for _us,_ then they'll fight to protect one another on my orders. And then they'll learn to do it without me needing to tell them."

"Naruto?" Ayame asked her third question in a row. "Isn't having a military force outside of the Hokage's knowledge or jurisdiction illegal? There's a difference between stealing food to survive, and creating a military force with the capability of seceding."

"Rebellion? Don't be ridiculous. It's...insurance. There's a long-term plan I'm working on with the Hokage at the moment, and if something goes wrong, I'll want people watching my back. I'm being cautious, and playing the long game." Naruto said confidently.

He remembered the Hokage's words from the last time they'd spoken. Careful consideration, never taking risks that he couldn't recover from losing. He wasn't stupid enough to think that a comparative handful of soldiers would be able to topple a village. However, if they were to be loyal to _him,_ and not the Hokage...there was some leverage in that. The ability to get things done, without raising his own hands to the task, if he chose.

"As long as you have a plan, I guess it's okay." Ayame relented, not sure if she really believed those words. Naruto had been kind to her over the last three and a half years, he'd kept her clothed and well-fed, but sometimes he ended up being more frightening than reassuring. Had he backpedaled on his thoughts when he believed she didn't approve? Whatever he wanted to call it, whether it was an army or a mercenary company, or something between the two, had one purpose: to fight, kill, and die.

They were people she'd grown up with. The last three years of her life had been spent becoming friends with them, living around them, eating and laughing with them. Could she stand there, and watch them die? Could she go with them, into a fight?

Ayame didn't like killing. She didn't like the idea of it, didn't like the act of it, and she _hated_ the aftermath of death. And yet, as she stood quietly in the silence beyond her words, she admitted to herself that blood was already on her hands. She resigned herself to a future she didn't believe in, just like that, to the hands of the only person she trusted.

Standing on the mantel, a picture of the Yondaime Hokage and his wife smiled out at the room. Naruto's gaze shifted, his eyes locked on the unblinking visage of his mother, and he made his decision.

"Let's get started." Naruto said. "We've got a lot of work to do."


	4. Binding the Gates

**WHO WON THE SUPER BOWL? MY PHILLY BOYS WON THE SUPER BOWL. You know, something I've only been waiting my entire life for. I was a kid when they went last time, and this still feels surreal. Nick Foles, Philly legend, confirmed for G.O.A.T. That's all. And before anybody gets uppity about the Ertz TD catch: naw, he caught it. Ground can't force a fumble. While we're at it? Lions should have won against the Falcons & Steelers should've beat the Patriots in their games with the same sorta catches officiated poorly. This is the last time you'll hear me talk about football until September, probably.**

 **Let's get this trainwreck moving.**

* * *

Naruto wasn't certain exactly why things had gotten to this point, but he did understand how. The passage of time was an unending struggle against the power of mankind, and it was something humanity could never win. So here he stood, fifteen years old, with words he'd known were coming to his ears.

"You fail." Iruka said. "Sorry, Naruto...maybe next year."

"What? No!" Naruto acted out his unwritten script. "Give me another chance, Iruka-sensei! It's been an off day for me, I can do it if you give me another chance!"

"I can vouch for that, Iruka." Mizuki said, looking at his co-instructor. "It doesn't make sense. Naruto's historically done well in class and practicals. Why not just let him through anyway?"

The fake smile he sent the silver-haired Chunin's way would hopefully sell his performance.

"We need ninja who can perform regardless of whether or not they're having a good or bad day. In the classroom, we've always offered tutoring and re-tests for people who needed them...but the real world isn't that kind. You can have all the skills in the world, but so do the people on the other side of the continent, and they won't hesitate to kill you if they find out you can't fight back." Iruka said, steel in his voice. "Sometimes, they get you anyway."

Mizuki and Iruka both looked down at the ground, away from Naruto and one another; clearly, there was a history that Naruto wasn't in on. Still, he knew his part in the scheme, and he exited the room. The rest of the day passed in as nondescript a fashion as it possibly could have, as Naruto quietly counted down the minutes until Mizuki ran out of time to take the bait he'd been offered. If he really was a traitor, and this four-year gamble hadn't actually been for nothing, then he would be approached.

At the end of class, as the rest of the children filed out with Iruka, Mizuki stayed behind. He sat, looking up at Naruto from his desk in the room's center, as the blond stared off into space.

"You gonna be okay?" Mizuki asked. "That was...he shouldn't have said that to you. He wants to protect you, even though you're older than we were when we graduated and became Genin. Still...there's something he didn't tell you."

Naruto's eyes flicked in Mizuki's direction, and the teacher grinned.

"There's another way to graduate. Pull this off, and you'll prove you have the skills to be a ninja." He said, and Naruto's eyebrow came up.

There it was again, the same smell of wet peanut butter that came across his nose when Mizuki was lying. The bait had been laid, Mizuki had gone for it...and now it was time to spring the trap.

"Give me the test." Naruto said. "I'll get it done."

* * *

The mission Mizuki had given, under ordinary circumstances, would have been somewhere between, "next to impossible," and, "a worthy challenge," if not for the fact that the Hokage was in on it. Steal the scroll that contained a written record of Konoha's Kinjutsu? Leave the village with it? Learn a technique, then report back to Mizuki?

It was such a painfully obvious trap that Naruto couldn't help laughing.

"He said he'd meet me a little outside of the northern gate." Naruto said, his serious tone failing to hide his humor. "At nine tonight."

He'd been given a dummy scroll. When the Hokage hadn't been looking, turning to walk away, Naruto had swapped the two; the only things in his possession that were faster than his mouth were his hands. Whether the wizened ninja knew or not, or perhaps if he approved of the idea of seizing power by any means necessary, he gave no indication.

With that, he was gone, racing through the air and across rooftops as his heart thundered in his ears. As he made one last flying leap, launching over the wall that had kept Konoha safe for nearly eighty years, he couldn't help but laugh at the feeling of freedom it gave him. Sufficiently clear of the village, and deep in the woods of Hi no Kuni, the Kinjutsu scroll was unrolled with a mix of veneration and excitement. At the top of the list was the _Tajuu Kage Bunshin,_ and Naruto remembered years ago when he'd had that fateful conversation with the Hokage. He'd mentioned other types of clones, ones that weren't illusions, who could be utilized in battle. This would let him summon a _thousand_ of them? At once?

Oh, there was _no_ question what he was learning. And right under that, a host of other techniques that had been recorded since the village's history. Naruto was far from religious, but on some level, he couldn't help understanding that he'd been given a gift straight from the heavens. Though he liked to believe in his tenacity and work ethic, he couldn't stop the passage of time, and before he knew it, the time for him to go meet up with Mizuki. He stood, beginning to walk towards the northern gate, and he swore that he saw movement out of the corner of his eye.

No flash of metal in the dying sunlight, which meant it was either an animal, or someone walking in an opposite direction. Still, he hadn't gotten a good enough look at whatever it was, and that made him a little nervous...but he had to keep going. Walking past limitless trees as he curved around Konoha's perimeter, he lost count of how many times he _almost_ saw something disturbing the tranquil twilight. Soon enough, after the sun had finished going down and full-blown night had set in, he'd gotten used to it and ignored it. If they were going to attack him, he resolved, then they would have done it while he was defenseless and inattentive.

"Mizuki-sensei!" He yelled, finally coming up on the silver-haired Chunin's position.

"You're late." Mizuki said dismissively. "It's five after."

"Yeah, well, it took a little longer to get here than I thought. I practiced for a while." Naruto replied.

"And that's the real Kinjutsu scroll?" Mizuki asked.

"And I learned a technique or two from it...maybe more."

Naruto's breathing was a little ragged, his ribcage swelling with just enough exaggeration to show he was tired. Even then, before anything else could happen, something hit him in the back.

 _Pain._ Naruto could feel the blood leaking down from underneath his shoulder blade, and he twisted his left arm around to rip out...

"An arrow? Mizuki...don't tell me you were planning to betray me? Even after I did what you asked?"

"I've got a confession to make, kid." Mizuki said. "I've been working for a man Konoha hates, for years. He's taken a pretty special interest in you, and the fact that you actually managed to get the Kinjutsu scroll, too? Sorry, but you're gonna have to come with us."

A two-headed ninja, and an Akimichi-sized one, both strode out of the darkness to stand behind Mizuki. Another arrow came from the left, though Naruto dodged it. Off of his right side, he heard a flute begin to play. A dome of earth came up around Naruto, and he heard the directive given straight from Mizuki's lips:

"Drain his chakra _just enough_ for him to pass out. We can't have him dying on us, Jirobo. He's probably going to become Kimimaro's replacement."

"Kimimaro's not dead yet." One of the onlookers said.

"Quiet, Sakon. He's strapped to an examination table. That's no way to live."

"Mizuki, did you forget?" Naruto asked. He felt something rising up inside of his blood, a primal urge that he couldn't deny.

"Forget what, Naruto?"

"We had a deal. You broke it...and I'm pretty mad about that."

It had been a little over five and a half years since the day Mizuki had made that promise, and the off-colored "IX" had branded his palm. Now, as that mark burned with pain, Mizuki looked down to see blood beginning to leak out from his hand. First in a thin stream, then in a surging wave, drops of blood came down to the ground like a waterfall from his hand.

"What? What's happening? What are you doing?" Mizuki said, panicked.

 **"You broke your end of the deal."** A voice that could only belong to Naruto, but that was distorted beyond recognition, announced. **"You gave an oath, and failed to keep it. This is my retribution."**

As that sentence ended, all the blood left Mizuki's body, and he crumpled where he stood. Drained of life, he watched in his final moments as Jirobo's earthen dome was shattered. Dying, he felt no fear as he watched a monster come forward.

"Haha..." He laughed. "Always did believe in you, Naruto. I'll...be...watching you. Give 'em hell."

With those final words, Mizuki's body erupted into ashes, and thin wisps of yellow light streamed towards Naruto before they were absorbed.

 **"Let me make you a bargain: I'll give you one chance to walk away."** Naruto said, his bloodshot eyes now complete with vertical slits. **"In exchange, you will not fight me, now or ever."**

The girl far to his right bolted off, and a red tether of power sprung forward from Naruto's right index finger before it attached to the strip of flesh between her shoulders and beneath her neck. The archer to his left followed after her, and this time it was his left index finger that released its power to brand. It struck the boy on his upper right arm; as the last remaining ninja fled with their comrades, Naruto's middle fingers let out their power; the two-headed man was branded on his torso, and the one who'd summoned an earthen dome was struck on the left ankle.

It wasn't shock at Mizuki's death that had made the Sound Four abandon their mission. It was _fear._ They'd heard stories, of course, about ninja with the power to single-handedly rip their ways across battlefields. They'd known that they were coming to capture the son of the Yondaime Hokage, who'd sacrificed his life in a Pyrrhic victory to kill the dreaded Kyuubi. Even four-on-one, their hearts had been filled with dread so great that it had overridden everything they knew. If you had asked Sakon, Jirobo, Kidomaru, and Tayuya whether they would rather face punishment for failing a mission, or Naruto's wrath...the answer was in the fact that they were running from him. Orochimaru was a harsh lord to serve under, but he was a firm believer in the idea that a mission wasn't always worth completing if the alternative meant staying alive.

Usually. He'd also been known to kill ninja who'd come back able-bodied after failing their missions, because he disapproved of cowardice on every possible level.

"Well, that happened." Naruto said, looking down at his hands before his eyes turned to the drying pool of blood that proved Mizuki had existed. It startled him.

While more than one of the orphans he'd fought in his attempts to become the king of the street rats had met an untimely demise, this was his first time killing on the orders of another person. Blood dripped from beneath the nails of the fingers that had branded the Sound Four, and a look of deep contemplation weighed on his face; he watched Mizuki's blood soak into the earth, remembering how the silver-haired Chunin had been the one to offer encouragement and aid. It was thanks to him, after all, that Naruto knew who his family was. While the man had brought it on himself, quite literally, Naruto had still killed someone he'd viewed as a friend.

He'd wanted to believe that the Hokage was wrong, but his hopes had been crushed with Mizuki's open admittance of betrayal. His train of thought solidified: the only people he could trust were himself and his urchin brethren. None of them, Ayame or any of the rest, would ever turn their backs on the young man who'd earned the title of _Banchou._ There was a deep comfort in that knowledge, at least.

The forest was quiet, allowing Naruto his space to think. Soon enough, though, the time for thoughts was over; understanding that the fact that he _saw_ the Anbu meant that they wanted to be seen, Naruto shrugged and turned to walk back inside the village. Contemplating the murder of his teacher and onetime friend, Naruto didn't feel the exhilarating joy in his movements back towards the tower of the Hokage. His body felt heavy, weighed down with purpose, as he opened the doors to the old man's office.

"Mission accomplished."

"Congratulations. Report to the academy tomorrow morning for your assignment to a team. And, before I forget: your hitai-ate."

Sarutobi Hiruzen held out his hand, producing the forehead protector from a containment scroll. Naruto took it gingerly, pulling the cloth ends around either side of his head and tying them into a knot that remained comfortable while staying secure. Just like that, he was officially a ninja of Konoha.

Just like that, he was given the understanding that his death had been put into someone else's hands.

"Thank you, sir. Will that be all?"

"No one is allowed to know what happened tonight, Naruto. This is a B-rank secret, between you and I. Do you understand?" It was a secret they shared with the Anbu that had watched Mizuki die.

A B-ranked secret was the lowest level the Hokage could authorize for sensitive information. It could be revealed and discussed five years after the events in question had passed, or files could be published if all involved parties were dead before that time had expired. A-rank secrets were subject to a ten-year period of silence, unless the situation prompting secrecy became irrelevant. S-rank secrets were to remain as such, under pain of death or exile.

At least the Hokage took his position seriously.

* * *

"Starting tomorrow, I'm officially a ninja." Naruto said. "I won't have the time to keep up with everything that goes on around here...but that doesn't mean you're allowed to start slacking!"

The crowd laughed at that; Naruto looked across the room, at the group of children he'd grown up with on the streets of the slums. He'd trained them all, as a group, to the level of academy graduates. While that didn't account for much on a scale of power, they were loyal to Naruto alone. That meant something.

"Technically, all of you are listed as civilians...if you're listed at all. Now that we're growing up, you need to find trades. Skills. What you want to do is up to you, but never stop training. Never stop working. And once I figure out what I want to do with _my_ life?"

"Game, set, match!" One of the teens in the back of the room piped up. "Whatever you're gonna do, Naruto, you're gonna be the best. We believe in you!"

Cheers met that proclamation.

"Make us proud, boss!" Another said.

"You're gonna be Hokage in no time!" A third shouted.

"Na-ru-to! Na-ru-to! Ho-ka-ge! Ho-ka-ge!" They began to chant.

This was not what Naruto had envisioned when he'd called all of them together. It wasn't a bad thing, to know that others had confidence in him, but he tried to keep his ego from becoming too inflated.

"That's enough of that." He said, raising and lowering his hands to quiet them down. "Even if I do become Hokage, my greatest achievement will still be gathering all of you together. Seeing all of us together, growing up, growing strong...that's all I ever needed."

He smiled, because it was the truth. As long as he had them, and as long as they had faith in him, there was nothing he couldn't accomplish.

"Okay, but when do we start celebrating? You graduated from the academy, you're a ninja! I feel like that at least deserves _some_ recognition!" Ayame said indignantly, hands on her hips as she leaned forward in mock irritation. "Gods, I went to all the trouble of cooking enough to feed everyone, and you haven't so much as mentioned-"

"Food?" Naruto asked. "Why did _nobody_ tell me there was food involved? You're all traitors! He said, his hands sweeping out in a gesture towards the room's inhabitants.

"I promise, Banchou, we'd have said something! After it was all gone!" One girl said.

Naruto sighed. You could take the orphan out of the street, but you couldn't take the street out of the orphan. There was no such thing as "too much food." He knew that. It couldn't surprise him that the food had been kept a secret; his stomach was the biggest of all, and he never quite felt satisfied. Even after years of living in a home with a stocked kitchen, and a girl who'd been trained to cook before her father's untimely demise, he'd never truly felt full.

Plates and napkins, and an obscene number of dishes, were carried out into the room. With the food set down on the ground, the former urchins gathered around one another and talked well into the night. Naruto left them to their own devices after an hour or so, leaving to stand outside of his home with the moon shining down upon him. The events prior had left him with too many more questions than answers.

What happened? Something had come over him, a burst of power that was strong enough to shatter his enemy's technique from inside his own body. It had ripped through the Genjutsu cast to keep him immobilized, and healed him from the wounds he'd suffered at the archer's hands. The deal Mizuki had made with him...had killed him when he broke it? There had to be some kind of _kekkei genkai_ involved. Probably on his mother's side, given that very little knowledge of the Uzumaki remained in the world after their village had been sacked.

He would find the answers to those questions. No matter who they made him out to be, no matter what he became in the pursuit of his own understanding...he was himself. That was all that mattered.

The silence of the night around him only seemed to agree with that notion.


	5. The Bell Test, I

**This chapter was like, 90% done a couple days ago, but for some reason I can only get my foot on the gas on the nights before I have shifts at work that start at 6 AM. I can already feel the coffee I'll be drinking in a couple hours.**

 **Review responses:**

 **1\. MetalRasenganBijuuLord: Yeah, the idea was to provide a power with a limitation, something that will come to serve as a cornerstone of Naruto's capabilities; it's completely and utterly reliable, it will activate whether or not he wants it to, but that's not always a good thing. While WTSIG Naruto's power ran rampant and mostly unchecked, until the back half of the story when other people actually started pushing his limits...the Oathkeeper is bound, quite literally, by his words. It'll come back to bite him in his face. It's like a way of enforcing canon Naruto's own _nindo_ : "I never go back on my word."**

 **Because he can't.**

 **Let's get this trainwreck moving.**

* * *

"Glad to see you made it, Naruto." Iruka said, a sly grin on his face as he looked out over the classroom. "I was about to do the attendance. Wouldn't bode very well for you to be late for your first day as a shinobi!"

"Thanks." The blond said, red eyes sweeping across the gathered students.

He took his customary seat next to Uchiha Sasuke. It wasn't because he held an outstanding friendship with the younger teen, and he certainly wasn't being _made_ to sit there, but the day felt too quiet. His small sacrifice, not being able to sit by himself, was as philanthropic as he could get; he was saving himself, and the rest of the class, just as much as Sasuke. As though on cue, the twin terrors named Ino and Sakura scrambled through the door, with their high-pitched voices and their schoolyard insults.

Naruto was thankful that Ayame hadn't turned out that way; maybe it was because she'd been second-in-command of their motley crew, but the other girls had all ducked their heads rather than deal with fighting her. It had always been refreshing to leave the childish power struggles of his fellow students behind, and he relished the thought of not having to interact with them again.

"Naruto."

"Sasuke."

The two greeted one another just like they had for years, without words getting in the way. Sasuke had always been slightly edged out from the top spot in sparring contests, owed in part to the fact that he was simply smaller-framed and lighter than Naruto; the two-year gap, from thirteen to fifteen, meant more now than it had in the past. It also meant more than it would in the future. Still...those were practice bouts, and from today onward, they were comrades serving Konoha.

"Is that everyone?" Iruka asked, looking over the attendance sheet and doing a headcount of the students who'd sat down. "Yeah, that's everyone. Congratulations, all of you! To make the teams weighted fairly, we tried to mix your three-man groups into average grades. That way, it doesn't feel like one team is getting a load of talent, while the others suffer. Under Kurenai Yuuhi: Aburame Shino, Haruno Sakura, and Inuzuka Kiba."

Naruto zoned out for a moment. While he heard Shikamaru, Ino, and Chouji's names called on a team together, he missed the name of their sensei. Several more names were rattled off, one after another, but just as Naruto allowed himself to relax into his chair, he nearly jerked back to the edge of his seat upon having his name called.

"Under Hatake Kakashi: Ne Sai, Uchiha Sasuke, Uzumaki Naruto."

Naruto looked to his left, and nodded at Sasuke. Sai sat at the very back of the class, almost more interested in people-watching than his studies. The orphan had run with Naruto, under his command, for the last seven years. Though his grades in the classroom had been mediocre, he was as fast as Sasuke, and physically just as capable of giving Naruto a serious challenge. As he thought about the team assignments, he realized they weren't random.

Kiba and Shino were two-thirds of a sensor team, but without a Byakugan or Sharingan, they weren't quite complete. Were they banking on Sakura being a sensor-type ninja? Or else, her high grades were equated with more intelligence, and she was meant to be their strategist. On the other side, the Ino-Shika-Chou trio was about as close to a three-piece suit allegory as humans could come. They were designed to cover for one another, and additionally filled the role of a scouting team. Meanwhile, the Uchiha's Sharingan and Sai's physical prowess, combined with Naruto's heritage and past, their purpose became clear: they were a heavy assault team, the kind that would be deployed to swing battles in Konoha's favor.

Then, of course, there was their sensei: Hatake Kakashi. Naruto had never met the man at length, but knew that he'd been a student under the Yondaime Hokage's command. He was a decorated veteran of the Third War, and a general consensus was that he rested directly beneath the Sannin on a scale of power.

That was weighted heavily in favor of Naruto's thoughts, and the three boys were the last ones left in no time; Sasuke and Sai were both composed, even if they were showing tics of impatience, but Naruto knew the game being played. He couldn't see Kakashi, and couldn't sense him either, but he'd patiently waited on marks for hours at a time before making his move to strip them of whatever he'd been intent on. Eventually, it would come down to who Kakashi thought the weak link was.

"Where is he?" Sasuke asked. "Some Jounin-sensei. Can't be bothered to meet his students?"

"I'm sure he has a reason." Sai said, looking straight at Naruto as he did. He knew.

There was a certain psychological victimization in knowing that they were being hunted. It was alleviated, a little bit, by the understanding that they wouldn't be killed...but Naruto didn't _really_ know his teacher, and it was bad to make assumptions. So he sat, stone-faced and silent, as he waited for the day to run its course.

"Sorry for the wait." A voice came from the door as it finally swung open again. "First an old lady needed help with her groceries, then a black cat crossed my path and I had to take Broad Street instead of Main Street, and then I almost walked under a ladder and I had to turn around the other way. Lucky for me, too, because right after that someone tossed a piano out of their window. Would've hit me square in the head, could you imagine?"

"Vividly." Naruto replied, and Kakashi raised his singular visible eyebrow in response; the Jounin's nose and jaw were covered by a microfiber mask that prevented his lips from being read, and beneath his angled hair, the standard hitai-ate draped across his face to cover his left eye.

"I tell you what, come meet me on the roof and we'll introduce ourselves." Kakashi said before vanishing with a puff of smoke.

Sasuke sprung up in anger, swift strides launching him out the door and towards the stairs.

"Wall climbing?" Naruto asked.

"Wall climbing." Sai agreed.

Naruto slid the window open, chakra reaching out from the pores of his hands as he used it to anchor himself to the side of the building. This was an exercise to improve chakra control, something Mizuki had taught him after he'd passed his fourth-year midterm. Remembering the silver-haired Chunin brought a fair share of pain to Naruto's heart, but he didn't regret what he'd done the night before. Chakra poured out of Naruto's feet, and he dashed up the side of the academy like a hunted jackalope. Turning to look down, he saw Sai calmly striding up the side of the building, parallel to the ground. Content with his friend's success, he shot up to the rooftop, and landed in a crouch.

"Hey." Kakashi said, a two-fingered salute coming up to his hitai-ate before he lowered it. "Glad to see you made it."

Moments later, Sai came into view, one step taking him from the side of the building to the rooftop, and the white-skinned boy nodded at his teacher-to-be.

"Where's the other one?" Kakashi asked, moments before Sasuke came into view. "Oh, there you are."

Naruto leaned against a post that held the roof's awning up, his bloodshot eyes focused on Kakashi as he waited for whatever came next.

"So, how about we introduce ourselves? We can, uh, do it like this: tell me your name, some of your likes, some of your dislikes, and your goal or dream. How about it?"

"Isn't it according to social convention to introduce yourself first?" Sai asked, and Kakashi shrugged.

"Fair enough. My name is Hakate Kakashi. I like a lot of things, and I dislike a lot more things. My goal is to have so much sex with so many women that when I finally die, every brothel across the entirety of the elemental nations is closed because every whore on earth is busy mourning my death."

"I'm sorry he asked." Sasuke grumbled, but Sai remained passive. On the other side of them, Naruto nodded sagely.

"An incredibly noble pursuit." The blond said. "But you'll need to chase that dream to make it happen."

"Thank you. Now, since you were the first one up here...early bird gets the worm. Tell me about yourself."

"My name is Naruto. I like food, money, training, and fighting. I dislike loudmouths, people who take their situations for granted, people who can't keep their promises, and organized religion. My goal is to keep finding more challenging opponents to beat."

"Next." Kakashi said, nodding to Sai.

"My name is Sai. I don't particularly like or dislike anything. My goal is to serve Konoha however I can."

Kakashi's lone visible eye darted to look at Naruto in questioning, and all the blond could do was shrug.

"Last to arrive, last to talk."

"My name is Uchiha Sasuke. I like my family and getting stronger, and I dislike anybody who gets in my way. My goal is to avenge my clan."

"Well, now that we've introduced ourselves, let me tell you what I see." Kakashi said, disinterested. "A broody emo wrapped up in his own power trip, a professionally mediocre societal reject, and a high-security convict in the making. Meet me at Training Ground Seven tomorrow morning at nine for the second half of your graduation test. A word of advice, though? Don't eat breakfast, you'll just puke it back up."

Kakashi vanished in another puff of smoke, leaving the three Genin by themselves.

"Well. That happened." Sai said.

"Can he really fail us after we already passed the academy tests?" Sasuke asked.

Naruto stayed silent, watching over the village and straining his focus in an attempt to keep himself in check. Without warning, he launched into a jump, performing an aerial _shunshin_ to land in a crouch on a rooftop. Dashing across Konoha's skyline on all fours, he ran, and a growling groan tore its way from his throat.

He had a promise to make good on.

* * *

"He's just going to make us wait again." Sasuke said.

"Probably." Naruto agreed.

"Why?" Sai asked. "The only person whose time he's wasting is his own."

"If we're mad at him, we won't be able to concentrate on whatever it is that he's going to throw at us."

"I don't understand. Why would he throw things at us?"

"No, Sai." Naruto said, and Sasuke face-palmed himself.

"Oh, I understand. It was a euphemism."

"Yes." Naruto and Sasuke gave the affirmation simultaneously.

Training Ground Seven was coated with lush grass at its opening, but dense forestry took over after a few paces behind the memorial stones. The carved rocks, made immutable afterwards with techniques Naruto didn't know, had the names of the deceased ninja from each war after the founding of the village. There was another for the victims of the Kyuubi attack, and a fifth that contained the names of those who'd died in the line of duty. Naruto sat down in front of the names of those killed on the night he was born, and he read to himself.

 _Uzumaki Kushina._ His mother. The name brought grief, and longing, to his heart. Why? He'd never known her. He'd never cared about the fact that he was alone in the world, choosing instead to accept his circumstances and improve them. Even so, deep in his core, there was a distinct familiarity with her.

 _Namikaze Minato._ His father. He read that name, picturing the man's face in his mind, and he lost himself for a moment in memories that weren't his own.

 _The village, burning down around him. Out of control, beyond the point of return, unable to save himself. Helplessness, under the ruthless oppression of another. Hate. So much hate. He opened his mouth, spitting brimstone bile with the hellish flames he'd been born commanding. Surely, if anyone could redeem him, it was Minato. Mate of his host. On the ground, unmoving, their child. Dead. Sorrow crept through him as he continued to attack, crying out in pain. With a final flash of yellow light, and a swirling orb of malevolent power grinding into his flesh, he was redeemed. But the child, the child..._

A hand on Naruto's shoulder snapped him from his reverie, and Naruto looked up to see Kakashi staring down at him.

"I miss them too." The Jounin said. "I wonder what they'd say, if they could see you now?"

"They wouldn't need to say anything." Naruto said, iron in his voice as he stood up. "Let's get this show on the road."

That vision bothered him. Where had it come from? What did it mean? He tried pushing it to the back of his mind, but it was impossible to keep from coming back.

"Alright. Since we're all here now, I'll explain the rules of this test. I have two bells," Kakashi raised the small ball-bells up, "and three students. No matter what, at least one of you is going to fail. To pass the test, you need to be able to take a bell from me before the timer is up. You have three hours, starting...now."

Sasuke and Sai sprang away, lunging for the cover of the forest, but Naruto stayed where he was.

"Not going to hide and wait for an ambush?" Kakashi asked.

"What good would it do? These odds are so far in your favor that it's not even funny." Naruto replied. "...wait a second."

"Oh?" Kakashi said, and despite the fact that he couldn't see it, Naruto was utterly certain the silver-haired Jounin was smirking.

"Tajuu Kage Bunshin no Jutsu." Naruto crossed two half-Ram seals in front of his chest, and a thousand copies of the blond had suddenly appeared in the clearing. "If I can't beat you on my own, then I'll just beat you by myself!"

"That sentence may be grammatically correct, but your logic is a little twisted. Why are you trying to do the work of a whole team?"

Naruto vanished in a _shunshin,_ disappearing into the forest as his clones were made into fodder. While the copies of Naruto were far from the original's durability, Kakashi was genuinely impressed; the _Kage Bunshin_ split the user's chakra into equal pieces, dividing them up between the clone and its progenitor. To have enough that he could call upon a thousand, at will, and still have enough energy that he moved without exertion?

Kakashi sighed inwardly, mentally noting to avoid turning any other remnants of the Uzumaki clan into his enemies. Things like this had been why they were feared enough to be massacred in the most casualty-stricken battle in the history of the hidden villages. Maybe Naruto's hair was all he'd gotten from his father?

* * *

"Sai!" Naruto hissed, getting the attention of his teammate. "I've figured it out."

"It's a trap. There's no way we can beat him." The black-haired boy said.

"Yeah. Which means either he has no intention of passing us, or he's...forcing us to work together. Damn, we really couldn't see that coming?"

"Apparently not. Should we get Sasuke as well?" Sai asked.

Naruto paused to think about it. He was no great friend of the Uchiha, as an individual or a clan, but he respected that Sasuke had a goal he was driven by; something to earn, something that couldn't be taken away.

"Yeah." Naruto affirmed. "Can you ping him down?"

The sun still hadn't finished rising. They had the time. Sai scribbled down on his chakra-conductive scroll, something central to his techniques and the most important thing he'd ever stolen in his time under Naruto's command as the Banchou. A black snake shot off of the page, racing as it looked to find Sasuke's chakra signature. Minutes later, it returned, and the two teens followed it as it slithered towards their query.

"Sasuke!" Naruto said, once the Uchiha was in sight.

"You look a little worse for wear." Sai observed.

"Tried to fight him one-on-one and lost. If you hadn't found me, I'd have gone looking for you." Sasuke said. "So, either of you have a plan?"

"Coordinated assault." Naruto said.

"Trapper-hunter-killer?" Sasuke asked.

It was the traditional team strategy of smaller units on the battlefield, where one person would lay down Genjutsu or physical traps while another would hound the enemy into position to trigger them. The third teammate would finish the enemy off; in war-zones, the fourth teammate was usually a medic, which meant the bulk of the fighting typically fell on three people.

Naruto shook his head at the question, though.

"No traps." He said. "We have to assume he won't fall for them, considering this is his chosen terrain and we don't have the time. You two aren't as durable as I am, so I'm going to fight him one on one, but you two need to take whatever openings I give you to join in and steal a bell."

"You're going to make yourself fail?" Sasuke asked.

"No. I'm going to make sure you pass." Naruto grinned.

"If Naruto and I are correct, then the test is designed to split us up and make us fail individually, so that we work as a team to accomplish our objective. So it doesn't matter if we succeed or fail."

"That's...pretty clever." Sasuke said.

"It is." Sai agreed. "Wouldn't you say so, Naru-"

Both of the black-haired boys looked to the spot that Naruto had been in moments ago, realizing too late that he'd walked back to the center of the training field to fight Kakashi.

"Geez. Couldn't he have done a count-down for us, or something?"

"Not how he works." Sai shook his head. "When he leads, he expects you to follow."

Sasuke huffed in irritation, but turned with Sai to watch as Kakashi stood up. He was brazenly reading the latest of the _Icha Icha_ novels, its bright orange cover a dead giveaway, but Naruto was a little miffed at that.

"You're not even going to pretend to take me seriously?" He asked.

"What? Oh, no, it's not that. I just got to a really good part. You can still come at me, though, I have a hand free. Your trick with the clones was nice, but unless you have something a little more intense up your sleeve, then all I'm going to get out of this is some light exercise. Whenever you're ready..."

Naruto sighed. Unfortunately, Kakashi's lackadaisical attitude about this was warranted; a Genin, fresh from the academy, taking on a seasoned Jounin who'd been trained under the Yondaime Hokage and served as the man's personal guard? Naruto loved to bet on the underdog, but not even he would have put money on himself.

"So be it." He said, bridging his hands to crack his knuckles. After a countdown that nobody heard, he ducked low and dashed forward.


	6. The Bell Test, II

**Sorry for the delay, I've had several situations pop up in my personal life that needed attention. Still kicking and breathing, though, and I made this chapter a _slight_ bit longer to compensate. This chapter covers a lot of ground, time-wise, but I accomplished what I set out to do with it.**

 **I just need to remember what that was.**

 **Let's get this trainwreck moving.**

* * *

Kakashi swept his free hand up, bending his elbow in a downward swing as he knocked Naruto's blows aside without lifting his face from the _Icha Icha_ novel.

"I heard about what happened, the night before last." The Jounin said passively, holding his book in such a way that he was turning the pages one-handed with his thumb. "It must have been difficult. Does it eat at your conscience?"

"He made a deal with me, and he didn't keep it. Whether I wanted to believe it or not, he betrayed me, and I did what I thought was necessary." Naruto replied.

That wasn't entirely true. His sudden influx of power, and Mizuki's death, had been entirely unplanned. Even as that was an absolute certainty, though, Naruto didn't feel like they were random occurrences. It had made him think back to the lines of an old song about the Great Darkness that ruled over the Biju, and all other demons: _Will you make a deal with the devil, in a place the sun can't reach? Will you sign your life away at the forest, at the beach? He can give you power, even safety, for a day...but if you ever break that deal, you'll give your life away._

"Not even a body left? That's what you thought was necessary? Well, at least you've got the right mindset." Kakashi said.

"His fault. Not mine." Naruto said, a little more bite in his voice than intended. "His backup got away though."

Sasuke launched out from the underbrush, kunai in hand as he sought to avenge his earlier loss. Kakashi dodged effortlessly, seeming to glide backwards through the air. One of Naruto's clones appeared, a well-placed kick missing its mark when the Jounin ducked and slung himself sideways. With that effort, though, he missed a small hand gesture Naruto made; Sasuke ignored his blond teammate, choosing instead to press after his teacher before Naruto ran to catch up. As Sasuke was launched away by a palm thrust, Naruto took his opportunity to ask a question in private.

"So, _sensei,_ how is it you knew about two nights ago? That's a secret."

"Not for the people assigned to it." Kakashi said, and Naruto had difficulty trying to place his tone between smug and self-assured. Before he could make heads or tails of the commentary, though, Sasuke was back...and an ink-black snake had curled itself into a noose behind Kakashi. As the two Genin, and Naruto's clone, pressed inwards, Kakashi stepped back.

The rope-snake went up, taking Kakashi by the foot with it, and a black blur passed by him before he made a quick getaway with the _kawarimi._

"Nice job, Sai. Guess traps work after all." Naruto congratulated his teammate with a grin.

The pale-skinned boy stood up, two bells in his hand as the trio turned to face Kakashi, who patted his waist and raised an eyebrow when he didn't feel anything tied to his belt loop.

"Congratulations." Kakashi said. "I'm guessing you figured it out?"

"That this was a team exercise?" Sasuke asked.

"Yes." Kakashi nodded. "The Hokage told me he was going to hand me students who had enough individual potential that he wanted me to train you, rather than keeping me on the active roster for mission-ready Jounin. Even knowing who you were, though? I wasn't going to accept you as my students unless you could understand how to work together without compromising yourselves. And, from what I saw yesterday, I think you stayed true to who you are. Naruto figured out the unspoken goal of the mission, gathered you all together, and led you toward it. Sasuke tried to do it on his own, but learned from experience. And Sai watched the entire time, waiting patiently until he found the best time to strike."

"How did you know?" Sai asked.

Kakashi didn't respond verbally, instead allowing a ring of twelve _Kage Bunshin_ to come out of the forest. Wordlessly, they raised their hands in half-Ram seals, and dispelled.

"I was watching the entire time." Kakashi said with a short chuckle. "Trust me: none of you moved a muscle without me knowing. I had twice as many clones when we started."

"Wait...when clones dispel, they transfer information?" Naruto asked.

"Yes. Did you not know that?" Kakashi asked. "It's what makes them preferable for reconnaissance efforts, over clones made of water or mud. Theoretically, it would also make them effective for training with new jutsu, but most people can't make enough that it would make a difference...let alone handling the mental strain that comes with it. The only reason I managed to dispel that many clones at once, just now, is because their five senses had remained mostly the same as the others. Otherwise, you might have seen me left in the hospital for a week."

"Well, now I know not to use it so recklessly." Naruto said.

"No, the fact that you're still on your feet means that you can probably abuse the hell out of it. Not a good idea for the sake of variety, but...up to you, obviously."

"Anyway...what now?" Sasuke asked. "We've finished your test, and passed it. What comes next?"

"I brought us lunch!" Kakashi said with gusto. "Lunch comes next. They'll start handing out missions for Genin tomorrow morning, so we'll do some more team training today."

As with plenty of other things Kakashi had said, that was _just_ true enough to not be considered a lie. Certainly, tomorrow would come, and missions would be given out...but what was stopping them from taking one today? There was at least one team of Genin in circulation from last year, did they just get a vacation day today? Not likely, as far as Naruto was concerned enough to think about it.

But Kakashi was officially his teacher now...so he stood there, he grinned, and he felt the weight of it all come down on his shoulders.

* * *

"You know, of all the things...of all the things that could be considered missions? I mean, I _guess_ 'rescuing pets' is up there on the level of importance, but..."

"Weed-pulling, fence-painting, floor-cleaning, public janitorial efforts, and babysitting feel like they aren't enough, Naruto?" Kakashi asked.

Team Seven was ill-suited to menial tasks meant for village maintenance or public relations. Even then, Kakashi had refused to allow them on the low-risk task of patrolling the first couple miles outside of Konoha's border.

"No, they're really not." Sasuke sided with his teammate. "We've been running three D-ranked missions a week, training like hell six days out of every seven, and we're still just doing chores."

"Some day, you'll look back on these missions and wish your life was this simple again." Kakashi sighed.

"Maybe, but our skills can be put to better use." Sai said. "We're combat specialists, and knives rust when left alone."

"Yeah. That." Naruto said. "Even a sleepy little escort mission would be fine, just for the practice."

Kakashi raised an eyebrow at that. If Naruto thought escort missions were "sleepy," then clearly, he'd never met the clients that requested them. Still, a C-ranked one usually ended up being mundane at worst, and the Genin did have a bit of a point. Perhaps it was time that he tested them in ways that mind-numbing chores couldn't.

"Alright then. Take it under advisement, though, that I'm going to be keeping you on shorter leashes if you screw this up. I'm a _good_ teacher, I don't have to be a _nice_ one."

That was the only warning they would get. Kakashi lived and died by the phrase, "those who abandon their team are scum," but he wouldn't tolerate failure on a mission that they'd been begging him for. This was the proving ground...assuming they got a decent-enough deal, mission-wise. Kakashi was well aware of the fact that unexpected obstacles came up, and that nobody outside of the team could necessarily be trusted. Still, even with all the potential risks, he could probably single-handedly salvage a C-ranked mission if he needed to.

Tora, the favorite cat of the Daimyo's wife, was held firmly in Naruto's grasp. For some reason, when held by the blond, Tora didn't struggle or attempt to escape. As Team Seven walked through the doors of the Hokage Tower, the Sandaime greeted them, and Tora's fur seemed to pale as it beheld its owner once again.

"Mission accomplished." Kakashi said as Hiruzen slid forward a manila envelope. It contained the payment for the mission, divisible by the four of them, and Kakashi had learned a long time ago to take the money _before_ turning in the infamous "Cat Outta Hell" that had made him rue his early Genin days.

As soon as Naruto had handed Tora over, the Daimyo's wife had squealed in glee and apparently sought to suffocate the poor bastard inside of her bosom. Not a terrible way to go, Naruto thought, but Tora had other plans. In a bolt of orange, it shed its fleshy prison and made a mad dash through the doors that led back to Konoha proper.

"No! Tora!" His owner cried out, and more than one of the ninja present offered up a quick prayer that the cat would stay lost. For its own sake, of course.

Sometimes, off-duty Jounin, or ninja looking to rehabilitate themselves after serious injuries, would chase and capture the cat to provide themselves with an excuse to exercise. It was just that grueling of a job...and the cat would always find some new way to escape. Legends were still told of the Great Tora Chase from the Sandaime's childhood, when poorer road quality and lower manpower had caused the mission to span three countries, five and a half months, and saw the reward for safe return climb up to a billion ryo.

"Should we..." Kakashi trailed off at the glares from two of his students. "Never mind! Hokage-sama, my students have lobbied, and convinced me: they want to take on the challenge of a C-rank mission."

"Oh?" Hiruzen leaned forward in his seat, his hands bridging in front of his face. "After two months of training, they've decided they know enough to survive outside the village walls?"

The three Genin shared a look, knowing a refusal of their request would be coming next. The condescension in the Hokage's voice stung at their collective pride, but what could they do about it?

"Well, we can't keep them young and safe forever. Someone tell Tazuna to meet his protection detail." Hiruzen said after a moment. "Your mission details are in this scroll, Kakashi."

A perfectly flat throw caused the scroll to sail through the air without twisting, and Kakashi deftly caught it with this left hand. Scanning the document's contents after unrolling it, lightning encased his hand and burned the scroll to ashes.

"As you order, Hokage-sama."

Kakashi had learned, years ago, to memorize a mission's parameters and leave no evidence of a contract. Legally, without proof to back up suspicion, ninja operating within foreign lands were untouchable; that courtesy was forfeit if they acted against said country's laws, but Kakashi wasn't worried about that. They were supposed to be heading into a civilian country, hopefully without needing to worry about nukenin, but the orders he'd just burned away...

His team had already bitten off more than they could chew, and barring an insane paycut, there was no way a second team would be ascribed to this mission. Was this a death warrant?

"I've placed my faith in you for two and a half decades of service, Kakashi. I trust that you won't fail me now." Hiruzen said sternly, a hint of steel in his voice that the Genin in the room hadn't heard much of before. The Hokage was renowned as a kind and benevolent man, not one to force the hands of others. And yet...

"Of course." Kakashi's gaze was unconcerned, a deep-seated refusal to show weakness overriding any concerns he felt. He was a soldier under orders, a piece in the game.

If he had reservations, he could bring them up in the debriefing.

They'd need to come back alive before that, though.

* * *

"They _really_ couldn't provide me with more experienced ninja?" Tazuna asked.

"You get what you pay for. What's got you so worried?" Sasuke asked. "It doesn't matter how many mercenaries are out there, we can mow through them. Anybody who's not a shinobi isn't capable of standing up to one."

Naruto didn't share that confidence. As soon as you let your guard down, believing yourself superior? That was when the enemy would find the perfect time and place to strike. It had been his way of terrorizing the shops he'd stolen from; the minute they'd believed themselves safe, he'd ripped away everything he could take. The survival of his family, such as they were, was more important than the welfare of the well-to-do. Survival on its own was the necessary course, over the idea that slabs of metal or pieces of paper determined human worth and that one had to do as told for their entire lives if they wanted to have any hope of living through it.

Naruto rejected that system. It was one that worked, and had worked for some time; it was a system of the old world, and the old gods, before they'd died in a time lost to history. It had let many people live lives of relative comfort, and let more still enjoy lavish luxuries...but a far greater number suffered endlessly because of it. Naruto had been one of them. He'd grown up without a single ryo to his name, and even after obtaining the inheritance that he cared little for, he'd returned to thieving to maintain his meager lifestyle.

While Naruto had never personally known Kakashi, it seemed like the man was spooked by whatever had happened in the mission room. The Jounin had taken a high perch, moving in the trees to get a better vantage point. Whether it was intentional or not, the man's hyper-vigilance was wearing away at Naruto's nerves. He'd been similarly straining his senses, but staying on high alert had taken its toll for the last five hours. He was no sensor, and his _keirakukei_ felt fried. Thankfully, he had teammates capable of putting two and two together.

"We passed a couple puddles a little while ago, but the air feels way too dry." Sasuke said. "It's July, and it hasn't rained in a week."

"If they're paying attention, they can tell you've been draining yourself as our lookout, but they may not know Kakashi's in the trees." Sai added. "Guard Tazuna, and we'll take care of th-"

Razored chains came around Sai from above, dropping to his throat and decapitating him, but not before he'd made the half-Ram seal and performed a _kawarimi._ Though Sai hadn't finished speaking, Naruto had gotten the drift of it, and hung back as Sasuke ran through the seals required to perform the _Housenka._ Burning shuriken fanned out, but they were taken off-course after clanging against oversized metal gauntlets. Ink-black snakes attempted to constrict the pair of enemy ninja that had come into view, but the same chains that had nearly taken Sai's life managed to butcher his creations.

"I'll be damned, Gozu. They might manage to put up a fight." One of the two men said.

"What, Meizu, a few greenhorns?" The other asked, though he didn't have long to think on those words; Naruto's fang-filled mouth was howling in his face with no warning, a kunai plunging downward before it was stopped by Meizu's gauntlet.

"Feisty." Meizu said. The edges of his gauntlet's claws cut into the kunai Naruto held, shearing through it like a knife in a well-cooked steak.

Naruto sprang away, tossing the broken instrument aside as he felt a deep anger well up inside of his chest. These two, possibly brothers by their similar appearance, had been stalking their party for at least an hour. He'd been irritated by his drunkard client's scathing demeanor, opting to travel in silence rather than engage in any kind of conversation with him. Kakashi hadn't been teaching them anything useful, only physical conditioning and bland basics like the creation of sealing scrolls to go with light sparring. The entire day had been nothing but one big eyesore, they'd been _this_ close to stopping for the night so he could finally rest, and now he was being looked down upon by mercenaries...or maybe they were nukenin, judging by their Kirigakure headbands. Either way, it was the last straw.

His red eyes had gone bloodshot, circular pupils once again turned to oblong slits that held no mercy, and he felt the euphoria of rage course through his limbs.

 **"Time to earn my keep."** He said, claw-like nails coming up to cut through Gozu's chest as he dragged his hand across the ninja's torso to expose white ribs to the dying sunshine.

Gozu shouted in pain, but as Meizu went to help his brother, a blindingly bright tanto came from the back of his skull to poke out from an eye socket. Meanwhile, Gozu had managed to get a grip on Naruto's throat that sliced into his weak flesh...but even so, Naruto had managed a killing blow of his own, with his hand buried inside of Gozu's chest.

Both brothers fell to the ground, dead, and Gozu's body emitted wisps of yellow light that carried themselves into Naruto's body. He pried the gauntlet open, his grievous wounds starting to regenerate, but they would still scar...and he'd lost a lot of blood in the few seconds he'd been cut and choking. Evidence of his close brush with death was evident all over his newly blood-soaked shirt, even as it dried over his newly-healed skin.

 **"Fuck."** He said, disappointed in himself, before he collapsed into unconsciousness.


	7. To Walk Towards Damnation

**Let's get this trainwreck moving.**

* * *

"We've only lost a half-day of travel." Kakashi said; these were the words that Naruto woke up to, with the sun shining overhead. "All due respect, but after your safety comes our own, regardless of the time constraints. Failing a mission is a black mark against any ninja's record, but it's more important to survive and regain honor than to die a failure."

"You don't understand! The longer we take, the worse the chokehold on my nation becomes!" Tazuna said.

"Oh?" Sai interjected, hanging upside-down from a nearby tree. "I was under the impression that we were an escort detail, not an economic salvage crew. Would you care to enlighten us, _sir?_ "

Naruto had sprung up, red eyes trained on the elderly bridge-builder who'd gotten them a quarter-day across Hi no Kuni. Sai was as plain-spoken as they came; for him to be using sarcastic honorifics, he was clearly envisioning Tazuna dead on the ground. Involuntarily, a hand rose up to the three equally-spaced scar-lines that ran across his throat, and he couldn't say that he wasn't feeling a similar contempt.

"Nami no Kuni is currently under economic siege by Kirigakure. Gato, a billionaire businessman, is using Kiri funds to have mercenaries extort the people of their livelihoods. He's also been given a small protection detail from Kiri...even though two of them are worm-food now." Kakashi explained, answering for Tazuna.

"Salvaged a bit from them, too. Razor-chain, their gauntlets, kunai and shuriken, with some scrolls and explosive seals thrown in." Sasuke grinned.

"What's the plan?" Naruto asked. "If you're right, sensei, then we're stepping into a bear trap."

"The Hokage hopes that if we can remove Kirigakure's influence, and Tazuna is allowed to finish building his bridge to the mainland, they'll choose to provide Konoha with their business rather than having ships sail to Kiri." Kakashi said. "We would receive a small royalty percentage on all sales for the first two years, to offset the low pay we take for the mission."

"So we're continuing the mission." Sai stated.

"And we should get moving while the sun is still here to guide us." Kakashi said, ending the conversation.

In minutes, their camp had been taken down and stored, so travel could resume. They traveled on foot for three more days, though they passed uneventfully. Each time he took watch, between Sasuke and Kakashi's shifts, Naruto could hardly focus on his surroundings as his eyes shifted between his teammates and his client.

 _"It's more important to survive...than to die a failure."_ Kakashi's words rang through his mind, each night, as he waited.

The Hokage had sent them on this mission. That meant he believed they would succeed, didn't it? That had to be the case. They were already embroiled in an eleven-year conflict with Kumogakure; it wouldn't make sense to use Genin as sacrificial lambs to start another war over. At that point, it would practically be a Fourth Great War.

No, they were capable of success. That was why they'd been chosen for this mission. It wasn't because he and his younger teammates were orphans who had little of a home to come back to. It wasn't because Kiri was in a weakened state and had other powers looking to strip them of their resources. Konoha was an affluent city-state, moreso than most other ninja villages or their respective civilian capitals, so they had no need of Nami's resources. This was just a ploy to prevent Kirigakure from taking the fruits of the citizens' labors for themselves.

And yet, in the back of his mind, something told him that it could never be so simple. He wasn't sure what that voice was, because he'd never heard it outside of his thoughts, but it was disembodied cynicism in all its glory. The Hokage had preached of peace and love for decades, but across his broad life, three Great Wars had been waged and a private fourth conflict remained strong. How did that saying go, again?

 _If you pray for peace, be ready for war._

As a concept, the notion held water; to be willing to fight for something meant that it was tied to your convictions. And yet...there was so much death. Even for ninja, who put their lives on the line every day, there were some things that came across as asking too much. They'd been given a laundry list of reasons to turn back and accept the punishment for failing a mission, but Team Seven continued to press on. It made no sense.

Neither did the sudden surge of ferocity he'd displayed as he'd leapt into the short-lived fight with the brothers from Kirigakure. He'd been aggressive, and then he'd felt it amplify to incomprehensible levels; it was the same surge of power he'd tapped into when Mizuki had betrayed him, though he hadn't felt it again in the months since. Did it only come out during real combat? What were its capabilities, its limitations?

Ever since he'd killed Mizuki, his movements had felt sharper, a sixth sense for danger embedded in the back of his mind; after awakening his chakra in the academy as a child, he'd been able to regenerate from wounds, regardless of their size. Staring at the sea, as Team Seven moved towards the coast of Nami no Kuni, Naruto had to admit to himself that he felt more comfortable as the mist rolled in over the course of the morning.

What was happening to him?

* * *

"Good luck, Tazuna." The captain of the ship whispered, clapping a hand on the older man's shoulder before turning around and moving back to his ship.

"Stay safe, Shigure." Tazuna offered quietly, before he and Team Seven headed further inland.

Within two minutes, the light brown sand gave way to healthy grass, as deep a green as Naruto had ever seen. The mist that had blanketed their approach towards Nami no Kuni was all but gone; only dew, on the leaves of nearby trees, had remained. Naruto had thought that Kakashi was fully alert before, but as far as the Jounin was concerned, they were in an active warzone. The good news was that their enemies' resources were finite. Due to the distance between Nami and Kiri, as well as the small size of their current territory, there would be no reinforcements. There would also be relatively few skilled fighters among Gato's henchmen.

The bad news was that Team Seven was stranded on their own. Severely outmanned, outgunned, and under-prepared, they had to survive in hostile territory until Tazuna had finished building his bridge. Worse still, their foes likely knew they were here. After the Demon Brothers had failed in their assassination attempt, dying in the process, their superiors would take note of the fact that they'd failed to report back.

"Hey, Tazuna, is it always this breezy in the-" Naruto stopped speaking abruptly, realizing that the cold chill he felt wasn't from any wind.

"Diamond formation around Tazuna." Kakashi ordered. "Kirigakure ninja are bloodthirsty assassins, we need eyes in all directions."

Rustling came from a bush as mist began to creep into the greenery surrounding them, and Sasuke threw a shuriken straight at it, only for a white hare to leap away from the foliage.

"Just a rabbit." He sighed in relief, before the mist around them immediately thickened in intensity.

Naruto stood at the back of the diamond, and while he knew that Tazuna was only a few arm-lengths away, he couldn't see the old man to save his life.

 _"Been watching you ever since you passed through the mangroves on your way to the mainland."_ A voice came out from the mist, from all directions at once. _"That ship was a nice vessel, shame her captain had to go down without her."_

Naruto's heart had leapt into his throat, even as it slowed its beating, and he could feel the repetitive _ba-bump_ reverberate ominously throughout his entire body.

 _"There are eight targets. The throat. The spine. The lungs. The liver. The jugular vein and the subclavian artery. The kidney, and the heart. Any one of them is a lethal blow...all I have to do is decide which one to strike first."_

"Big talk from someone who's too afraid to show themselves." Sasuke said. Without warning, an elongated senbon needle had buried itself in his side, and the Uchiha gasped in pain.

 _"That was a warning shot."_ The disembodied voice declared. _"Did you really think I would fight fairly?"_

"Futon: Daitoppa." Kakashi unleashed the Great Breakthrough technique, the mist around them giving way to reveal that they'd been corralled inside a dome of close-layered ice panels that shone reflectively. And yet, there was nobody else among them...until a masked figure appeared in one of the frozen mirrors.

 _"Unfortunate."_ The ninja said, though they shrugged nonchalantly after the word had left their mouth.

"Katon: Goukakyu!" Sasuke shouted his technique's name, but the flames of the Uchiha clan's signature technique dissipated harmlessly as soon as they reached the ice panels.

"Well, that's not good." Sai said. "Futon and Suiton, combining to create Hyoton jutsu?"

Under normal circumstances, Katon would overpower Futon, and a strong-enough Katon technique would neutralize a weaker Suiton jutsu. Combining the two together, however minor, exponentially increased the resistance to fire. Sasuke was at a disadvantage...but nobody had said anything about brute force.

"Tajuu Kage Bunshin!" Naruto yelled, a mass of clones filling the area of the dome around them; while it was impossible to see from their vantage point, Naruto had drummed up even more doppelgangers to appear outside of the ice.

One hit became two, and two became two hundred, as Naruto's _Kage Bunshin_ shielded his team and client from harm. Even then, something was wrong. The ice was broken by sheer blunt force trauma, and Team Seven escaped from the ice-cold clutches of death, but there was another ninja with their masked assailant; tape-armor covered the bottom half of his face, like a poor man's mockery of Kakashi's own mesh mask, but his eyes were those of a mad dog who was itching to fight. He'd taken to killing Naruto's clones in the time before they'd punched their way through the Hyoton technique, and the ease with which he held his blade aloft was nothing to sneeze at.

"Konoha just loves shoving their hands in other villages' business, huh?" Momochi Zabuza asked, his head tilted to the side.

"Not our fault he chose to hire Konoha-nin." Kakashi said nonchalantly. "We just showed up for the job."

"Well, that's true, but it doesn't help either of us. You're guarding a man who I want to see dead, on the ground, in front of me. Any chance I can convince you to leave Kirigakure to its territory-to-be and turn the old man in? Truth be told, I don't actually _need_ him to be a corpse, but...well...I like killing. Never would have thought that the _Issenjutsu no Meijin_ would greet me in this dump, though."

"Well, I wouldn't have thought that a country too poor to afford a ninja village's protection would have drawn someone like a member of the Seven Swordsmen out here, so I'm just as surprised as you are."

Zabuza shrugged, but the _Kubikiribouchou_ wasn't lowered. Instead, the Jounin of Kirigakure hoisted it to rest on one shoulder, and Naruto had to pause to marvel at the man's strength. That sword was easily as tall as most men, if not taller, and most of the blade was decently thick before it fanned out to its single edge; a backswing wouldn't cut anything, but it could turn bones into splinters with a strong enough pull.

"It's not like I chose for my unit to come out here, but we're getting paid...and you killed two of my men, which I'm not particularly excited about. So, even with those kids with you, I'm not inclined to show you too much mercy. Haku! Deal with the brats!"

"As you command, Zabuza." Haku sprung off to the side as Zabuza engaged Kakashi, and the masked ninja stood in front of Team Seven's Genin.

"You two go help sensei. I'll deal with this clown." Naruto ordered, rushing forward. Avoiding a stab from one of Haku's senbon, he delivered a vicious right cross that Haku couldn't back away from in time. The mask around his face shattered into pieces, and Haku saw the future of Konoha's mighty war machine with his own two eyes.

Haku launched two senbon towards Tazuna, but ink snakes rose up to knock them off of their trajectory.

"You can't seriously believe we'd abandon you like that, Banchou." Sai said. "Not me, at least."

"Kakashi's a Jounin, he can handle himself. We'd be getting in the way." Sasuke said.

"Fine!" Naruto said, hissing as a senbon stabbed into his arm.

"Your camaraderie is admirable, but I'll have to put an end to it here." Haku declared, mixing shuriken and kunai into his next aerial attack.

"Suiton: Mizudeppo!" Haku called out the name of his attack.

Water condensed from the mist, pooling into an oblong pebble-like shape, and it came forward with more force than Naruto believed precipitation had any right to. It ripped through his leg, as he'd leapt away from Haku in the process of the casting, and it took Naruto a moment to realize that the Water Gun hadn't lost momentum after leaving him with its exit wounds. Almost in slow motion, he watched the deadly liquid sail through the air...only to catch Sasuke's smug smirk as Sai tackled Tazuna to the ground. A quiet light shone on the grassy plain they stood on, and then?

Then, the world was fire. Naruto was flung forward by the blast, which had used up one of the explosive seals that they'd taken from the defeated Demon Brothers. Kakashi and Zabuza, caught off-guard, had similarly been knocked away.

With two tomoe in his Sharingan, Sasuke stared Haku down. His hands seemed to blur as he wove through his hand seals, and this time, the _Goukakyu_ wouldn't be denied. Heat rolled out of the Uchiha's mouth, condensing itself into a fire that stretched out twice as tall and wide as he was. The fireball rolled on as Haku dodged to one side, Sasuke's armor-tape-covered shin rising up to block a stabbing senbon.

"Clones!" Sai yelled, as one moved to engage him and another attacked Sasuke from behind.

Sasuke wasn't turning, did he just assume that one was going after Naruto? The blond rushed up, moving to block the attack aimed at Sasuke's neck, but his footing went slick. Naruto looked down, his brain registering that the ground beneath him had become a sheet of ice, and that was the last thing his left eye saw. A senbon came down from above, the attack intended to sever Sasuke's spine, and Naruto could feel the needle touch _something_ inside of his head.

It started with a low groan, his human mind formerly too simple to grasp and command the power he'd been blessed with. An awful, ear-splitting headache that hurt enough for Naruto to cry tears of pain. He clutched at the senbon after Haku had backed away from what _should_ have been a killing blow, and he ripped it away. His skin was crawling with metaphorical millipedes, and in their place was a sudden undulation between hot and cold. In one moment, Naruto felt like his body was freezing to death; in the next, he was burning and dehydrating. In the process, despite his body's attempts to regenerate the eye he'd lost, the replica kept getting destroyed.

And then, noticeable to everyone present, came the nauseating wave of energy that Kakashi would never forget. The last time he'd felt it, a decade and a half ago, he'd been there. He'd been witness to the proceedings that had shattered his world forever, on the night Naruto had been born. Utter violence, and dreams of damnation, had haunted him ever since.

"You were supposed to be dead." Kakashi whispered. "Sensei was supposed to have killed you."

Naruto felt the surge of power thundering through his veins, a source he'd twice tapped into that was now fully exposed. Red miasma coiled around him, painful sensations fading as his singular eye gazed upon the world in its true state.

"Eyes on the prize, Kakashi." Zabuza warned, the only words that the Jounin would be given before the _Kubikiribouchou_ swung around. Kakashi wove under the blade, a kunai coming up to leave a cut along Zabuza's face, and the pair of Jounin began running through identical hand seals.

"Suiton: Suiryudan!" Both men shouted, the watery dragons colliding and exploding into rain and steam. Zabuza lifted his blade and swung once again, as Sasuke, Naruto and Sai all killed the icy clones that Haku had called forth.

 _The real one's not among them._

This time, as Zabuza's sword came down, Kakashi opted to block instead of dodge; he was strong enough, the massive head-hunting blade stopping in its tracks, but Kakashi had been fighting against Zabuza alone. He'd accounted for his students taking on the Kiri-nin's apprentice, but Sasuke's _Goukakyu_ had acted as more of a diversionary shield than an attack against the once-masked shinobi. Kakashi couldn't turn, practically trapped by the force of the blade that he'd blocked.

Haku was there.

A senbon was there.


	8. He With Vision, He With Power

**Despite the fact that work often makes me feel like it, I'm not dead, everybody. Time for chapter eight!**

 **Review responses:**

 **1\. The-dark-power-of-the-Darkness: If you hate cliffhangers, then you're not going to like me very much. I don't always hit you with 'em, but when I do? You'll be feeling it.**

 **2\. TigrezzTail: I'm not sure how many times I'll have to say it, but Kurama's dead. There was no sealing. Straight-up murdered. Naruto _is_ the Kyuubi.**

 **3\. CygnusFang: It's not an AU of WTSIG, and I don't plan on making this fic's endgame anything remotely like that, but remember how WTSIG ended? Who's to say that old friends never return?**

 **Let's get this trainwreck moving.**

* * *

Like it was in slow motion, Naruto's demonic eye traced the path Haku had taken, from hiding in the treeline after Sasuke's _Goukakyu_ to the _shunshin_ he'd used to appear. Kakashi's flak jacket provided resistance, and would have stopped the senbon in Haku's hand if the needle had been thrown, but that hadn't been the case. Between his ribs, angled to pierce through the heart and left lung, Kakashi felt the slim lance of doom pierce through his chest.

"Run!" He shouted to his students. Immediately following orders, Sasuke bolted, and Sai wasn't far behind as Tazuna followed them. Ice spread out from the area around Kakashi's wound, cold frost churning through muscle, bone, and organ as it sought to finish killing Kakashi.

Naruto didn't turn the other way, his nails now permanently lengthened and hardened into vicious claws that mocked evolution's capacity for deadly creation. The red miasma around him, an altogether different energy than chakra or ki, focused itself into a fist-sized ball that shone like fresh magma. Haku had made a move to pursue the Konoha-nin who'd fled the scene, but Naruto's first _Bijuudama_ was nothing short of an act of revenge.

A cacophonous roar shook the island nation, its echo audible for miles as the demonic blast made contact with Haku's body. Light enveloped the world of all four ninja who remained, and then there were three. A trench had carved its way into the earth, slim where the _Bijuudama_ had begun...and then increasingly wide, after the point where it had met Haku's ill-fated interception attempt. There were no trees left on the path to the coast in the direction Naruto had fired in, sand and waves now filling the distant horizon.

"Haku!" Zabuza yelled the name of his dead subordinate, helpless rage evident from the way his eyebrows were set on his face. And yet, what could he do?

His brief battle against Kakashi had cost him an enormous amount of stamina and chakra, and Naruto's reserves had hardly been touched on. Or, at least, he looked that way. Despite his missing eye, Naruto cut an imposing figure, even though he was half of the assassin's age.

 **"I'm going to kill you, Zabuza."** He'd heard the name once, and now he committed it to memory. **"I'm going to taste your soul. I swear it."**

A binding light, red and unbreakable, surged from Naruto's right ring finger to brand the _Kirigakure no Kijin_ with an "IX" across the inside of his left bicep. At the same time, wisps of light sprang up from the dust where Haku's body would have rested, pouring their strength into Naruto's body.

The ground shook, loose rubble floating into the air as first one, then two, tails extended out from Naruto's coccyx. Like a hydra, they multiplied, until nine tendrils of energized flesh floated in the air behind the blond. Beyond all control, he raged, and another _Bijuudama_ took shape in front of his outstretched hands. Without using hand seals, he performed a _shunshin,_ arriving beside Zabuza and releasing the devastating attack at point-blank range. Just like when the youki-composed bomb had connected with Haku, there was nothing left; even the _Kubikiribouchou_ had vanished.

"Kyuubi." blood sprang up from Kakashi's mouth, staining his mesh mask. "No...Naruto. I won't ask you to avenge me. Just...make sure you return to Konoha. I know that look on your face, and I know what's on your mind, but let go of revenge."

 **"No."** Naruto refused, adamant.

Kakashi coughed as he laughed.

"It'll come with time. I remember when I was the same way...you'll get there. One last thing, though?" Kakashi pulled the senbon from his chest, wincing despite his inability to feel the frozen flesh that came with it. He'd become numb, barely capable of maintaining consciousness; soon enough, he'd go to join his teammates and sensei.

Kakashi's arm rose to shift his hitae-ate up, revealing a single Sharingan that had likely been a replacement for his original eye, judging by the scar that ran over the skin surrounding it. As Naruto knelt down, intent on receiving a last gift from his Jounin-sensei, green chakra coated Kakashi's hand. He gripped his Sharingan with dexterous care, pulling it out by its root and holding it in his hand for a moment before raising it to Naruto's face. The root connected with the back of Naruto's empty eye socket, the eye suctioning itself into place as a whirlwind of visions came through his mind.

"As ninja, our duty is to protect and serve." Kakashi said, his breath becoming lighter. "Some would say that duty belongs to the village we live in, but I only ever wanted to protect my teammates. Hopefully, that Sharingan will help you as much as it helped me."

Kakashi leaned up, clasping Naruto's hand with his own.

"No matter what they say when they see what you are., you'll always be the son of your parents."

Kakashi's body collapsed, falling away from Naruto, and a seal came into view on the right side of his cheek. In seconds, his body had caught fire, and Naruto watched the fresh corpse burn. When all that was left of the man were ash and bones, Naruto bowed his head and walked away. His tails had retreated, and his power was hidden from the world for the time being, but his blood-red eyes were prepared for more bloodshed.

* * *

In the two months since his arrival to Nami no Kuni, Naruto had learned to hide in plain sight. Nobody would notice the color of his eyes, or the abnormal nature of one of them, if he kept his head down. Nobody would question why he looked so strong, and well-fed, if the clothes he wore were large enough to hide his frame. But, most importantly of all, none of the island's inhabitants would reveal his whereabouts or description if he killed the thugs that occasionally patrolled the town.

He'd slain three of the mercenaries in the first month, finding their crude extortion distasteful, but he'd taken the lives of nine more over the last week. They'd started traveling in pairs, and groups of three, and he'd seen them start working around the clock rather than act as enforcers of an admittedly arbitrary curfew. One or two deaths had been capable of classifying as an oversight, but more than one a week was too much, too fast. All the same, Naruto couldn't stop himself.

His kunai and shuriken, forged with chakra in addition to their metal components, were stronger than the weapons that civilian-born mercenaries had access to. With his sharpshooting aim, he was capable of injuring them in ways that wouldn't reveal his profession; it might have been due to the fact that he'd lost one of his own, but the eye was a favored target.

"You should stay indoors, kid." Naruto said, looking away from the boy who'd been close to punishment at the hands of his most recent victims. He was leaning against the side of the alley they stood in, two bodies on the ground as a testament to Naruto's handiwork.

"What would it matter? No matter how many of them you kill, there's more. There's always more. It's hopeless." The child moped, and Naruto saw the same hopelessness he'd felt in himself before the day he'd saved Ayame's life.

"But I've bought you another day." Naruto tilted his head down, his eyes closed. "You're living on borrowed time, sure, but you're still alive. Try to appreciate that."

He stood to his full height, beginning to walk away, when he felt the boy grab onto his hand from behind. Resisting the internal urge to turn and ram a kunai through the skull of his small assailant, he stopped in his tracks.

"Yes?" He asked.

"What's your name?" The boy asked.

Naruto thought about it.

"You can call me Yuurei." He decided. "For all the people who've lost their lives to Gato, and the people working with him. I'll take everything he owns, and everything he owes."

With that, Naruto walked off, rounding a corner before performing a _shunshin_ that sent him out into the night. From above, an eye with three tomoe watched as the boy raced home.

 _Yuurei._ A ghost. It was a little too on-the-nose for Naruto's taste, but he hadn't wanted to give his real name, and he'd been put on the spot. With the eye he'd been given, and all he'd learned from it, it was almost like Kakashi was sitting inside of his head. The Sharingan had transferred twice, with two owners after the original wielder, but he had access to its wealth of information. Closing his eyes and beginning to focus, he took his focus inward.

He started with his feet, aware of each toe that sat in perfect stillness, and moved up to his legs. From there, his spacial understanding ran up from his fingers and gut, past his lungs as he reached his neck. When he reached his eyes, a giant projection of the Sharingan floated in front of himself in his imagination. In the pitch-black night of his mind, he stood before it, and as he reached out toward it, he saw the hall of its memories. Pointedly ignoring his own, as there wasn't anything particularly special about those, he looked at the breadth of Kakashi's memories, and the brief window into Uchiha Obito's.

Obito's list of memories, as a stream of consciousness, was several orders of magnitude smaller than Naruto's. The Uchiha couldn't have had his Sharingan for more than a day or so, from what he'd pieced together after watching it. Kakashi, on the other hand...Naruto understood some of the man's dying words, after he'd seen what the Sharingan refused to forget after Obito died.

The _Chidori._ A weapon of raw destruction, the result of a pursuit of violence. Raiton chakra in its purest form, encasing the hand of the wielder. Capable of cutting through anything, and everything. In Kakashi's later memories, after he'd skipped around a bit, he'd watched a more advanced version of the technique split natural lightning in half; the _Raikiri_. Kakashi's own creation, made complete after he'd been given Obito's Sharingan.

The _Rasengan._ His father's technique, the _Chidori's_ equal in power, and just as simple in its creation and execution. Chakra without an element, bound in a sphere, a whirling dervish of annihilation that tore through everything it came into contact with. Still incomplete, despite its would-be status as the ultimate shape-transformation Ninjutsu. The _Chidori_ had been Kakashi's answer to it, a failed attempt at combining the _Rasengan_ with elemental chakra. They were techniques Naruto had never seen before he'd come into possession of his new left eye, but he was far from a slow learner.

"You must be the last one left." A voice roused him from his reverie, his demonic right eye opening as he looked in the direction of the speaker. If they'd meant him any harm, they would have attacked first. That was how ninja liked to operate, more often than not. At the very least, they weren't here for him.

"Two ran away on my orders. The other one died...but I got my revenge." Four ninja. One with two heads, and one far bulkier than the others, who he recognized immediately. "You were the ones with Mizuki that night, weren't you?"

"Yeah." The original speaker said, a dark-skinned man who Naruto surmised to be the archer that had shot him almost six months ago. Neither of the two he knew on sight had been the one to shoot him, and judging by the flute on her hip, the redheaded woman was the one who'd lulled him into her soft Genjutsu on the night he'd truly become a ninja.

"So what brings you here?" Naruto would be lying if he said he didn't want to give payback for their attempt to kidnap him, but he had a more important wound to attend to at the moment.

"Our master finds what Kirigakure has done to this country to be...distasteful." The portly man said, his face seemingly set in a permanent sneer. "He also wants to know more about you, though you're not our objective."

"Which means..." Naruto started thinking. "You're here for the civilians, for whatever reason? Probably evacuating them as a front."

Naruto didn't know those eighth-note hitai-ate that they wore. He'd have to do some searching, at some point, but he was fine with them for now.

"We also came to help you finish your mission, although we didn't know how many people came out here...or were still alive." The two-headed man said. "We're normally a five-man unit, and based on what I can feel about you, you'll make a good stand-in."

"I don't have a very good track record with teammates, apparently." Naruto said with a sliver of sheepishness.

"If those shitheads end up dying, then it's their own fuckin' faults." The redheaded woman growled.

"Tayuya! How many times have I told you-" The Akimichi-esque man only got so far before the lone woman interrupted him.

"It's a shit-twistin' kind of unbecoming for a young goddamn lady to say fuckin' swear words, and all that other bullshit? This is probably the fifth time today, Jirobo, you asshole."

"Before you ask, I'm Kidomaru, and yes, they're always like this." Kidomaru extended his hand for a handshake, which Naruto looked at warily before accepting. "The twins over there are Sakon and Ukon. It's their ability...and you probably don't want to know any more than that."

Sakon raised a hand in greeting, waving nonchalantly as he went back to being silent.

"And you?" Jirobo asked.

"Yuurei." Naruto said, deciding to stick with the name he'd given the civilian boy a few minutes ago.

"Alright, then, Yuurei. We've got our own mission to accomplish, but you'll hear back from us in, oh...a week?" Kidomaru shrugged, having given his best estimate.

"Try to keep a low profile until then, please." Jirobo didn't think he was asking very much. Naruto could certainly avoid being noticed when he wanted to, and avoiding the capture or attention of civilian mercenaries was several orders of magnitude beneath the ceiling of his capabilities.

"Tell me when you're ready." Naruto said, closing his right eye and turning back to face the street from his perch. Silently, the four ninja vanished into the night, and Naruto didn't relax until he hadn't felt their eyes on him for an hour.

Naruto's current pace was unsustainable. Gato had the money, and Kirigakure had the ninja, to flood Nami no Kuni with more bodies than he was capable of killing. If he was going to do anything about the midget in a suit, then he'd have to do it soon, with the help of ninja whose allegiance was unknown to him. No, it wasn't unknown. He just wasn't thinking hard enough about it. What was it that Mizuki had said, that night?

 _"I've been working for a man Konoha hates..."_

Who did Konoha, as a civilization, despise? The Sandaime Raikage had personally kidnapped a Hyuuga girl more than a decade ago, but despite Kumo's clandestine war with his home village, that seemed to be more of an older generation's pain. On top of that, even though Mizuki had admitted to his betrayal, he'd specified a single figure...and the four ninja he'd branded with his oath weren't wearing Kumogakure's hitai-ate. To say that it was Uchiha Madara was as ridiculous as it got, considering that the man had been dead for nearly as long as the Sandaime Hokage had been alive, but who else was such an infamous villain in Konoha's history, enough to be despised and vilified by everyone who heard their name?

 _Orochimaru._ If the realization had been a snake, it would have bit him. The perpetrator of an event so numbing, it was simply referred to by Konoha's citizens as, "The Massacre." To give it any more descriptive a title would be like congratulating Orochimaru for the murder of almost an entire clan; the only survivors had been children and teens, seemingly at random, and it had left Uchiha Itachi as the head of his clan.

The people whose help he'd accepted were under direct orders from a public menace. Naruto remembered the sharp change in the village, pre- and post-Massacre, as well as the steep decline in police presence. Without the Uchiha, who'd acted as the bulk of Konoha's nightstick-wielding, badge-toting brigade, the Banchou and his crew of merry misfits had been able to run even further amok than before. And yet...how many lives had it been, taken from Konoha's formerly single-largest clan? Two hundred? Three hundred? Naruto didn't know, and at the moment, he didn't want to think about it. If he had to accept help from the _Byahebi_ to achieve his goal, then he would do it.

His mission had stopped being about saving a nation after Haku had shoved a senbon into Kakashi's back.

Over the next several days, he noticed a distinctly smaller populace in Nami no Kuni. Though the number had been modest before, even fewer children played in the street. There weren't enough people working for what could have been, in better times, a bountiful autumn harvest. After the fifth day, It seemed that there were only a handful of people left in town. On the sixth day, Naruto found the boy he'd rescued earlier in that week, following him home before he overheard the mother-and-son duo talking from his perch above their kitchen window.

They were Tazuna's daughter and grandson. Holding out hope that the architect would return home, how they'd refused to evacuate with the group called the _Otoyon,_ the Sound Four. Naruto wanted to reveal himself, reveal that Tazuna was likely going to remain on the mainland for the rest of his elderly life. And yet, who was he to steal hope away from those looking for salvation? What they truly prayed for was an absolution of tyranny, the destruction of a greedy mogul. They wanted an end to Gato's regime.

Naruto could at least try to deliver that.


	9. The Desolation of Wave, I

**Chapter nine, ready at last! Between work, getting sick to the point of wishing for death, and falling back into playing Overwatch again, I lost a lot of time that I would have used to work on this fic. Sorry about that!**

 **Review responses:**

 **1\. TigrezzTail: Not your fault. Given that you're not the first person to have made that mistake, I'm guessing I just wasn't clear enough in the writing; sorry if I came off as insulting.**

 **2\. Noahendless: Since the Sharingan can memorize any jutsu it sees, I figured it would stand to reason that it just has a nonstop photographic memory. It's never used that way in canon, but it would make sense.**

 **3\. Jojo: Yeah. In _Within the Straws I Grasp,_ I got away without killing off too many people I liked, but my goal is to be a much more ruthless author this time around. Teuchi's death (glossed over in the first chapter) along with Mizuki's, and then Kakashi's, are my attempts to set the tone. Canon Naruto pulled his punches, and _WTSIG_ Naruto did up until the back third of the story, but the Oathkeeper isn't afraid to go full-tilt.**

 **4\. CygnusFang: He has access to them in the sense that he's now seen them done from a first-person perspective, but he'd still need to practice in order to accomplish any level of battle-readiness with them. You'll see a few of them, doubtlessly, but maybe not for a few chapters.**

 **Let's get this trainwreck moving.**

* * *

Over the course of the last week, Naruto had watched the presence of guards increase as the number of townsfolk shrank. Gato was uneasy, and his men were on edge. It was like a feast of fear, laid out as a banquet for Naruto to devour. Kakashi had been on a mission like this, once before, as the leader of an Anbu squad. They'd evacuated as many of the citizens as they could, only to sweep through the city like a homicidal plague.

"Those civilians aren't coming back, are they?" Naruto asked.

"Probably not." Kidomaru admitted, shrugging his shoulders.

Naruto sat with the _Otoyon_ squad in one of the abandoned homes. Having not yet taken the liberty to finally bathe again, after more than two months of scrounging up food in the wild and living in the slums of Nami no Kuni, his normally neon-yellow hair was caked in dust and dirt. It didn't bother him; he'd gone for years without proper hygienic care as a child, after turning the streets into his home.

"What's the plan?" Tayuya asked.

"We should wait for a little while after the sun goes down." Naruto said decisively. "An hour. Op starts an hour after dark. We'll stealth-kill our way up to the mansion, and then we'll wipe it out, down to the foundation. I guarantee you, Gato's got some way off this island, and I don't want him getting access to it in time for him to escape."

"Solid plan. Split groupings? I feel like having all five...six of us in one place isn't such a great idea. I'd rather avoid friendly fire." Sakon asked.

"Tayuya with you and your brother. Jirobo and Kidomaru with me. Tayuya, you're a Genjutsu specialist, right?"

"Right." The redhead said.

"Based on the rest of you...Sakon and Ukon are the assassination specialists, Jirobo is the juggernaut, and Kidomaru is the strategist and trap-master."

"Labeled us perfectly, Yuurei." Kidomaru grinned, light filtering in through the window to fall on his teeth. "Tayuya puts 'em to sleep so Sakon and Ukon can do their thing, I watch you and Jirobo to make sure nobody gets cheap shots in?"

"Sums it up pretty well." Naruto said.

"Like a perfect replacement for Kimimaro." Sakon commented, one eye open to watch Naruto's movements. The only thing he got for his efforts was a raised eyebrow from the blond, but that seemed to satisfy him.

"He's supposed to be the one leading us." Jirobo said, gripping the edge of the table hard enough that his knuckles paled. "Instead, they've got him strapped to an operating table. No offense, Yuurei, but I'd feel more comfortable if he was here."

"None taken." Naruto shrugged, only for a loud clattering sound to put all five ninja on high alert. Without hesitation, they moved out of sight, far from windows and doors. Naruto moved to the house's staircase, still close enough that he could hear outside the building's constraints.

"Marcus, you idiot!" Someone shouted, presumably one of the mercenaries Gato had hired.

An outlander? That was a foreign name. Naruto knew that somewhere beyond the uninhabited deserts of Kaze no Kuni, an entirely different civilization had managed to survive the dead gods' fall. He didn't know much about them, the records and accounts were scarce, but Kakashi had met one of them once; he'd seen it through the Sharingan, a four-sentence conversation that had ended with the two men walking in separate directions.

In the present, the wall creaked as a fist hit it. Not a full body, it wasn't a strong enough impact for that, but it was an audible blow.

"Do you think yelling is going to help?" A second voice emanated, clearly exasperated with the first speaker.

"Zabuza said that it's a demon who's been killing all our-"

Naruto's mind checked out for a moment as he processed that name. Zabuza was still alive? He'd survived a _Bijuudama_ at point-blank range? But he'd seen the devastation it caused to the land! He'd seen the wisps of light that confirmed Haku's death, and the same result had...

No. Not the same result. After he'd killed Zabuza, nothing had come to him. After killing Mizuki, and the Demon Brothers, and Haku? Their energy had come to him, bits and pieces of power. That hadn't happened after Zabuza was attacked with the _Bijuudama._ Haku hadn't had a body, and it had still happened. Of course Zabuza was still alive, he'd been careless and not bothered attempting to confirm it.

"-so if you don't want to die next, then we need to find him and kill him first!"

"We've been searching through houses all day. They're all empty." The second speaker said.

"Listen, man, I'm wiggin' out over here. This ain't normal, and it ain't good. It's a ninja, he killed the rest of Zabuza's team, and Zabuza barely escaped! We were given a death sentence!"

"Oh? No we weren't. Listen, Gato may be rich, but he doesn't have the time or the money to label people as expendable. clients get a reputation for that, they start seeing a _lot_ of lost interest in their jobs. Besides, nobody can outrun death. Let's just check this house, see it's empty, leave, and get on with it."

The knob on the door turned slowly, almost painfully slowly, and Naruto heard it creak as it swung open. He felt, rather than heard, one of the Sound Four move deeper into hiding. Two separate sets of footsteps followed the sound of the door swinging shut, and Naruto grinned. Opening his Sharingan for the first time in days, having long ago adjusted to functioning with one eye, he heard the two men moving and allowed it to calculate. As soon as the first boot came into view, Naruto didn't hesitate. With inhuman grace, he shot straight up, chakra allowing him to stick to the wall and ceiling with no sound from the contact. As the mercenary came up the stairs, while his partner continued to search the lower floor, Naruto froze as he weighed his options.

One second. Two seconds. Before the third second could arrive, Naruto was falling forward, a small disc of flames hovering in front of his hand. With virtually no resistance, he swung, and the severed head was cauterized before it could begin to fall. Deftly, Naruto caught both the head and torso, holding back his mild revulsion at the fact that he was handling a corpse. Letting it down gently, Naruto watched as the customary wisps of light flowed from the dead man to him. As always, they were absorbed into his skin, and he felt his strength grow.

"Oh, gods, no! What's happening?"

Those were the other mercenary's last words. Presumably, Sakon or Ukon had used their _kekkei genkai_ for an assassination that left him fully conscious and aware of what was going on. Poor bastard. He'd been bought for his life in temporary service, and could never collect on the interest.

Should have picked a safer profession.

Naruto stayed low to the ground, closing his left eye again as he moved. The Sound Four had gathered together by the time he reached them.

"They're out looking for me." Naruto grinned slightly. He held full confidence in his ability to indefinitely avoid civilian soldiers.

"Possibly in force." Jirobo added. "Which complicates things. If we keep waiting, they'll inevitably surround us. Breaking through wouldn't be the hard part..."

"Watching our backs would be the problem. It's difficult to move forward while looking backward." Sakon said.

"Speak for yourself, asshole." Ukon spoke for the first time that Naruto could remember, but the blond and the rest of the Sound Four laughed; Ukon wasn't always necessarily dormant, but he _was_ always facing backwards while Sakon carried him.

"Anyway." Naruto went back to being serious. "Schedule's moved up. As soon as we're out of this house, we're cutting our way to Gato. Anything else to say before we head out?"

"Yeah, actually. Got something for you." Kidomaru said, pulling a scroll out of his pack and handing it to Naruto.

"What's that?" The blond asked, hesitant to unfurl it.

"It's a summoning scroll. Pull it out, put some blood on it, and it'll summon a snake to get you out. You may not have to use it, but keep it as a contingency plan. I'm a spider summoner, so the rest of us will get out that way, but I was told to give that to you."

"I'll keep that in mind." Naruto said.

"Alright, are we fucking ready already?" Tayuya asked.

The Sound Four had their collective gaze on Naruto, who paused for a moment. Just like with Mizuki, he saw brands of power. Just above Tayuya's neckline, between her shoulderblades...Kidomaru's right arm...Jirobo's ankle. He knew where Sakon had been touched as well; he'd done it. In small writing, almost to the point of calling it a scar or a tattoo. Whether they liked it or not, they had made their pact with him.

"Let's go." Naruto said.

* * *

If he'd asked Tayuya what she thought of the situation, the redhead likely would have replied with something along the lines of, _a bloody fucking mess._ He'd been ready to assault Gato's mansion and mercenaries, but he hadn't thought about the kind of fighting force that a multi-billionaire could buy. Naruto was taking far more liberties than he knew were reasonable, purely because he'd seen his own regenerative abilities in action.

"You know, Yuurei...this may be a bad time to bring it up, and I have total faith in your skills, but is that a member of the Seven Swordsmen?" Kidomaru asked.

It was late August, but a dead tree sprouted no leaves, and Zabuza sat on the trunk-end of a branch that would have snapped to pieces if he hadn't been using chakra to displace his weight. Naruto could feel the weight of his eyes, and he understood the meaning of killing intent; the sword-master had come to finish what he'd started, just over two months ago.

"Oh, great. Just great." Naruto grimaced. "Leave him to me."

A saw-blade came down, and Naruto could feel its bladed teeth ripping through his chest. Enraged, he gave a baleful glare to the mercenary responsible before reaching out and ripping his throat away.

"Zabuza!" Naruto shouted, venom in his voice as he felt hate bubble up inside of him. Like a geyser of malice, his body felt energized, and his skin took a slightly darker tint.

"I still owe you for what you did to my men." The _Kirigakure no Kijin_ said menacingly, dropping from his perch.

He landed, all fury and no sound, pulling the _Kubikiribouchou_ from the magnetic clasps that kept it on his back. An ethereal image imprinted itself on Naruto's mind, a feline demon older and more fearsome than the Nibi no Nekomata could ever dream of becoming. Zabuza had become its avatar in the waking world, a newborn god in the land of men. A monster, in the flesh.

The feeling inside of Naruto's chest was somewhere between apprehension and anger. Adrenaline poured into his body, and his muscles screamed at him to move, but he stood where he was. The blood from his previous wound had already dried, and there was an air of power surrounding Zabuza as he walked forward.

It was fear.

Naruto was afraid.

Suddenly, he was five years old again, an orphan on the streets who dumpster-dove for food and had to fight not to cry every night he went to bed hungry. He stared, wide-eyed and unblinking, as Zabuza approached him. He felt so _small,_ and the monstrous assassin from Kirigakure seemed to tower over his existence. Someone was shouting at him, was it Jirobo? He heard the voice, but couldn't put words to the sounds that reached his ears. Too much was going on. What could he do? What should he do?

"Yuurei, get the hell away from him!" Tayuya shouted, her voice cutting through the raucous combat.

Like the last twist of a lock getting picked, everything clicked into place. He wasn't Naruto anymore, he'd _never_ been Naruto. That was a name he'd been given on the streets, after he'd raided a ramen shop and been caught eating some of the toppings. He'd made it his own, but the name he'd chosen... _Yuurei._ The ghost. Something inhuman, something that continued to live long past the point where it should have been killed. Involuntarily, his hand rose to his throat, feeling the scar-lines that had been left by Gozu's gauntlet.

Ghosts couldn't be killed. They were already dead, and remained on earth because their business was unfinished. Naruto continued to stare at Zabuza, but the set of his eyes had changed. He wasn't thinking about the past anymore; he was dialed in on the necessary actions of his present. Calm, quiet anger had once again settled itself in his gut, and he felt no fear.

He was the living sacrament of Konoha's triumphs, and a monument to all their sins.

"There's nobody to bail you out this time, brat." Zabuza snarled beneath his armor-tape mask, the _Kubikiribouchou_ swinging from right to left.

Naruto jumped to avoid the massive blade, but Zabuza was a Kenjutsu master, stopping his swing on a dime and turning it into a straight-angled slash toward the sky. Unfazed, chakra spread out from Naruto's feet, a bright red energy that bit into and corroded the legendary sword. With his balance stabilized for a split-second, Naruto took his chance, a left cross ramming into the older ninja's jaw as he dipped away to avoid retaliation.

"I'm not letting you get away again." Naruto hissed, opening his left eye to reveal the Sharingan that Kakashi had given him before his death.

"You took his...oh, gods, you poor fool. How much could you have learned in two months, with nobody to teach you? Hatake Kakashi was a true shinobi, down to the end. You're just a bumbling student who hasn't experienced the joys and horrors of war." Zabuza laughed, swinging his blade once again.

Naruto was just barely inside its range, and common logic would dictate that he should dodge outside, but Zabuza was coming at a steep angle and could thrust as easily as finish the swing. The most survivable option, then, was to move _forward._ Naruto rushed inside the swing, and felt his right collarbone snap like a twig as the _Kubikiribouchou_ tore through a lung and the beginnings of his intestines. He felt like his chest was on fire, with his muscles and organs unnaturally exposed to the evening air, and he brought chakra into his left hand. Raising it, he grinned.

"Futon: Bakuha!" Naruto coughed, spitting blood as he spoke, but his palm seemed to glow white before a wave of wind ripped itself from nature and forced Zabuza away. The _Kubikiribouchou_ went with him as he hit the dead tree he'd been sitting in, knocking it over in the process.

In full view of anyone who cared to look, Naruto's flesh began to knit back together. Organs became un-ruptured, muscles healed and reattached themselves to bones that snapped back into place, and his skin crawled back across the wound to cover it. A clean white scar-line contrasted with Naruto's flushed skin, and Naruto felt like his jaw might unhinge as he let out an involuntary roar.

Loose stones began to shake, and then rise, as Naruto felt a soothing release of his mortal restraints. Corpses shook on the ground nearby as a tail began to manifest out from the base of his spine. First one, it split into three, and then each of those multiplied the same way; nine inhuman appendages extended back, and Naruto felt the urge to _destroy._ His very breath was poison, and he was an unnatural defilement of what it meant to be alive. A monster, by any stretch of the means.

 **"HAKAI!"** Naruto bellowed his command, and the world obeyed. His tails swirled, the ground rumbling beneath him as a dark orb shot forth from his outstretched hands. It touched one of the mercenaries who'd felt less fear than his fellows, and there was no hesitation in the technique's application. In an instant, the man had exploded; bloody meat, bone shards, and pieces of organs, had blossomed from the area where he'd been standing.

 **"HAKAI!"** He shouted again. **"HAKAI! HAKAI! HAKAI!"**

 _Destroy. Destroy. Destroy._

It was the mantra of demons, lords of annihilation against whom there was no defense. What could nullify the ability to kill? What could stop a raging hell-beast that knew nothing but violence and death?

 **"Kidomaru, you need to get your team out of here!"** Naruto called out to his temporary teammate, watching three more of Gato's mercenaries get wiped off the face of the earth.

Zabuza hadn't been idle, his hands running through seals as fast as he could manage them, and a three-headed water dragon roared to life as it tore through the air towards Naruto. The blond's fourth orb of destruction collided with the _Suiton: San Suiryu Endan,_ absorbing the jutsu without disappearing. Like a rock, it dropped, colliding with the ground.

With a violent shudder, the earth yawned, and deep-hidden magma shot high into the twilight sky. Quickly, the geyser fell, turning into a river that torched the grass and trees that stood nearby. The sun had set mere minutes ago, but Nami no Kuni was bathed in light, and the air shimmered as Naruto stared down Zabuza from across the molten river.


	10. The Desolation of Wave, II

**No, I'm not dead. Yet. It took me a while to finish this chapter, but when I finally got the time to do it...well, you're getting it now, right?**

 **Review response:**

 **1\. TigrezzTail: Oh, no, Zabuza has quite a bit longer to stick around and play _Daes Daemar_ with the rest of the ninja world. You can be sure of that. Unscathed? Maybe, maybe not...and mentally, or physically, is the question to be asked there.**

 **2\. MetalRasenganBijuuLord: That's alright, man, I definitely get not always having time or knowing what to say. Thanks for your support!**

 **Let's get this trainwreck moving.**

* * *

Flames licked the sky as the ground below caught fire, grass and trees drying out and smoking in moments before flaring up like a lost temper.

"A living demon." Zabuza said to himself. Despite his own words to Gato's mercenaries, he hadn't wanted to believe it. "A humanoid one, in Konoha's service. That shouldn't be possible."

By all accounts of myths and legends, nearly every demon besides the Bijuu had been killed in the war against the dead gods. Makai was broken to pieces, the Great Darkness having long since fled that realm at its first opportunity. The Heavenly Throne was similarly destroyed, and only the World Tree existed as proof that the Age of Gods had even come to pass.

The blond wasn't human. Zabuza had understood that as soon as he'd seen the corrosion that Naruto's chakra had caused in the _Kubikiribouchou._ It could be split, and cracked, but even Mei's Futton techniques weren't capable of putting burrs in his blade.

As fast as he could, Zabuza did his best to process what was happening, and why. The Sharingan was renowned for its ability to memorize and replicate anything it saw, and it was possible to learn a dead shinobi's techniques and chakra natures, even their _kekkei genkai,_ through harvesting cells from their body. Zabuza had graduated from Kirigakure's academy at six years old after murdering an entire graduating class of children more than twice his age, which meant he was more than slightly lacking in any formal education, but he was capable of putting obvious conclusions together.

The demon had access to every technique that one of Konoha's most feared and decorated soldiers, Hatake Kakashi, had ever seen or used. On top of that, demons grew stronger by killing their enemies. That was why the Bijuu were so powerful. They had killed vast numbers of men and other demons in their quest to slaughter the gods, growing to the point of no longer needing their physical bodies. It was what had been so shocking about Konoha's death tolls after the night the Kyuubi had attacked them: somehow, the Yondaime Hokage had been able to force the Kyuubi to physically manifest, and then he killed it.

And yet, the demon before him bore nine tails. A young blond man with mismatched red eyes, but if he were to imagine that they were blue instead...No. Namikaze Minato hadn't _killed_ the Kyuubi. It was an engine of destruction, a force of nature, a king of demons on par with the Great Darkness. There was no way a single human had that level of power. The child was no Jinchuriki, and no seal bound a demon to his flesh, but what if the dead Hokage had forced the Kyuubi to take a mortal form against its will?

All of that power, all of that demonic energy, inside of a baby's body? There was no seal that could prevent the obliteration of the infant's _keirakukei,_ or the hemorrhage of its brain. It would be like trying to fit a king-sized bed inside of a shot glass. The container would rupture, the power source would overflow, or both would happen at once. So if the boy in front of him _was_ the Kyuubi, then he was a drastically weaker one than the demon that Uchiha Madara had bent to his will.

In theory.

Two months ago, Zabuza had taken that _Bijuudama_ at full force. That hadn't been a fluke, and it wasn't thought out; it had been performed due to instincts born from violence. He'd used the _Kubikiribouchou_ to guard his body and perform a _shunshin,_ letting him escape with nothing more than some light contact burns and an annihilated blade. That was a nuisance long past, since his sword's reformative abilities were well-known. And yet, ever since that day, it had felt...lighter, but thirstier. A reverse of the _Samehada,_ which Kisame had revealed to grow heavier as it consumed more chakra.

Now, his sword arm trembled, but it wasn't from fear. Each of Kirigakure's great blades was a monstrosity born of hate and enmity, and the _Kubikiribouchou_ seemed excited to go up against the ninja who'd so viciously broken it. It had felt Naruto's chakra, knew he was nearby, and it hungered for his infernal flesh. As a last resort, though, Zabuza reminded himself of his escape plan. In the event that Gato went down...well, for the moment, that was a _"what if,"_ and Zabuza himself held no love for the tyrannical businessman. The most important thing, even more than killing the newfound Kyuubi or his friends from Otogakure, was to make it back to Kiri alive and in one piece. Hopefully, that wouldn't be too difficult.

A little gingerly, he stood up and away from the dead tree that had broken his fall. If that demon could split the earth open and let magma run free, then his Suiton techniques would be an exercise in futility and wasted chakra. It would be better to just augment his movements, and take every advantage his larger frame could give. Sheerly by virtue of his age, he would be stronger and faster than any teenager whose body hadn't finished growing. If only he knew his opponent's capabilities! Training in mock battles against Yagura and Utakata in preparation for enemy Jinchuriki had been strenuous enough, but a Jinchuriki in their fully possessed state was weaker than their unsealed demon. As long as Naruto lived, he would continue to be at his strongest.

In the blink of an eye, the _Kubikiribouchou_ was in Zabuza's right hand, and chakra had spread evenly across his body. That expression on Naruto's face...a deep-set look of merciless anger. It was a good expression for a demon to have. Appropriate, even.

 **"I see you."** Naruto snarled. **"Analyzing, high and mighty, so secure in your skills that you stop worrying."**

The demon mistook his silence for arrogance? Good. Better to stay quiet, then, and make him lose focus in his rage. As long as he could continue to dodge...but a well-aimed strike would end it. Before he could act, though, the gulf between them widened further. As Nami no Kuni was ripped into pieces, flames spread further along the quick-drying grass. How many crops were being burned to cinders? Kirigakure had used the island nation as an external foodsource, taking enough to survive their recent lean years while leaving the civilian settlement with enough food to subsist on. Gato had been a necessary evil in that circumstance, to be _"removed,"_ in the Kirigakure way, as soon as he became irrelevant.

Why another village had decided to get involved was beyond Zabuza's willingness to understand. Any village leader with half of a working brain, a category that the renowned Sandaime Hokage certainly filled, would have understood a front when they saw it. Sarutobi Hiruzen had deliberately sent a team of fresh recruits to face off against a death squad. Worse than that insult to his team's skills, the trio of Genin had come off better in the exchange.

The entire campaign, over these past two and a half years, had left a deeply bitter taste in Zabuza's mouth. Now, he'd reached the dregs, and it was time to finish things.

Naruto shot forward, rising high over the lava and coming down at just a steep enough angle that Zabuza would have difficulty blocking with his blade. The swordsman backed away, but immediately after Naruto had landed, Zabuza took a step forward and swung for a powerful strike from his right side. Ducking under it, Naruto came forward with his hands racing to make seals.

 **"Katon: Hi no Rendan."** The blond growled. Six bolts of fire streaked out from the lava behind him, twisting into thin lances that ripped through the air before crashing into Zabuza's body.

The ex-Anbu promptly melted into a puddle of water that evaporated seconds later. Immediately, Naruto leaped to his left, avoiding an identical swing to the one he'd gone beneath moments ago.

"Good. Good." Zabuza said. "That probably won't work again, but this wouldn't be fun if you didn't have good reflexes. I need to enjoy cutting you to pieces."

Naruto stayed silent, his eyes not leaving Zabuza's.

"Don't find too many beasts like you in the wild anymore. Civilization bred 'em all out, or killed them." The swordsman grinned, his giant blade twisting in the air. To swing it with an axe-grip, where his top hand slid down to increase power, was just a basic maneuver that some people believed most of the Seven Swordsmen's weapons mandated.

They were wrong.

The _Kubikiribouchou_ had a lengthy handle for a reason, and the blocks that separated the handle-pieces from being one smooth rod were similarly thought-out. The more space he had between his hands, when both were on the grip of the sword, the more leverage and control he had over it. The effectiveness was normally more easily demonstrated with a katana or shorter blade, but the _Kubikiribouchou_ had drank deeply of Naruto's blood, and its weight had continued to decrease as it acclimated to his unholy power. There was little limit to the range or depth that Zabuza's strikes could take.

An ordinary sword would have broken, and stayed broken, but the Seven were remnants of a bygone era. They were indestructible, and had only grown stronger as the weight of age settled down on them. Zabuza's generation of the _Shinobigatana Nananin Shu_ was the most powerful in history, and while the group had traditionally been at one another's throats over conflicting ideologies and goals, they'd been united in their unwavering service to the Mizukage. Zabuza was not the strongest of the Seven, or the fastest, but he was the most adept assassin, and the unquestioned master of the _Muon Satsujin._ He'd been content with that; each member of a group had their role to play, and greed had only ever proved to be a universal undoing.

It had been too long since he'd gone home. The Demon Brothers had been comparative small-fry who'd still known what they were getting into, but Haku was far too young to have been assigned to this mission. He'd have to speak with the Mizukage when he returned to Kirigakure. As he once again swung at Naruto's torso from the right side, and the blond backed a half-step away, he put his years of practice into motion.

Zabuza twisted his wrists and slid his back hand up the shaft of the _Kubikiribouchou's_ handle, the simple motions driving the sword from a straight side-cut to a vicious downward slash that took Naruto across the front of his ribcage. The damage healed over in seconds without scarring, but Naruto's miscalculation was as clearly visible as the blood dripping down his chest; to account for a sword's full threat range, he needed to account for the arm, the blade, and the handle.

When Naruto had dodged backwards to avoid the simple attack that he'd avoided multiple times before, Zabuza had used that last piece of the swordsman's puzzle to his advantage. His weapon had a deceptively long series of removable handles, and by manipulating his grip on the sword as well as his leverage in the other hand, he'd created a diving slice that had taken Naruto by surprise.

"Can that eye of yours predict every movement I can make with my sword, even before I make it?" Zabuza asked. "I'd think that you'd know better than to come after me, if that's the case."

Naruto hunkered down in response, culminating in a four-limbed leap that no human would have performed on instinct. The blond demon twisted in the air, and Zabuza's long history as a warrior told him to move the hell out of the way. A flash of raw chakra was the only glimpse he'd get as he ducked away, unable to completely move the _Kubirikibouchou_ from Naruto's path. A blindingly white orb of annihilation ripped through the space between both ninja, an extension of Naruto's hand that touched Zabuza's sword before grinding into it.

That sound was _awful._ Metal screamed its agonizing protests as it contacted a technique Zabuza had only heard of. It had connected from underneath the decapitation ring, buzzing in deep enough that the blade snapped. Zabuza still had most of his sword, but the ending was jagged; it was as unclean and ferocious as the attack that had put it there.

"The Yondaime Hokage's..." Zabuza shook his head, growling, as he chose his next course of action. "You know, little demon, I think I've had enough fun playing with you today. If you ever want to try again, come find me in Kiri."

He couldn't afford to get seriously committed here, on this dying island, in a battle that was far from in his favor. He wasn't running away, he was making a tactical retreat. With two consecutive _shunshins,_ he was well out of Naruto's theoretical threat range, but still visible.

"Kuchiyose: Gyaku!"

As Zabuza leapt into the air, a massive shark appeared from a cloud of smoke. Rising to swallow him whole, it vanished in the same way it had arrived. The ground rumbled underneath Naruto's feet, and he turned back to see that the Sound Four were all gathered in a tight circle.

"Yuurei, get over here! The island's going to sink!" Jirobo shouted. "We're getting out with Kidomaru's summons!"

Naruto shook his head. He'd thought of a better idea, and the opportunity that came with it. Besides, if he really need to, he could always just use the summoning scroll that Kidomaru had given him. Something told him that his hunch was correct, though. Gato couldn't have walked to Nami no Kuni, and the idea of being _ferried_ would undoubtedly have sat poorly with the billionaire. A man with that kind of money would have a high-end yacht, and if he had any kind of sense, he'd be headed there now.

So Naruto vanished into the orange glow of the lava-lit night, killing as he went, until he came to the top of the hill where Gato's mansion sat. From his vantage point, he saw the mogul running towards a private dock with one ship moored.

 **"Smaller than I thought he'd be."** Naruto said to himself.

While it was true that his main point of reckoning was with Zabuza, Naruto had a bone to pick with Gato as well. He'd grown up in utter poverty, stealing food or going hungry, and the grotesque wealth of corporate monstrosities like Gato was a root cause of that kind of suffering. Of course, the night of the Kyuubi's attack had been what robbed him of his family, but that was just playing a game of semantics. In the name of greed, terrible atrocities were committed...and permitted. For the sake of one man's ambition, a nation had been left to dwindle into nothingness. Humans were such sad creatures.

Like a blight-walker from the old legends from the time of the Age of Gods, Naruto wove through the trees that began to catch fire. The island trembled again, and Gato fell. He was so close to that boat...Naruto would have liked to see the man suffer, but he couldn't afford to waste time. Darting forward, he was nothing but a blur of skin and tails as he raced to the lone ship. With practiced ease, he called upon the _Tajuu Kage Bunshin,_ and the mooring line was cut as his clones shoved the yacht out to sea. A _shunshin_ took Naruto onboard, but to his surprise, there were no mercenaries left for him to fight. Gato must have sent everything he had at the _Otoyon_ when they'd followed Naruto to make their assault on the tyrannical midget.

Naruto was more than happy to begin sailing away.

Quietly, with a firmly-entrenched sense of detachment, the blond saw a geyser of lava shoot into the clouds of the night sky. Smoke wafted up from the island, and he was just getting away from the area of its odor when he watched the incredible happen. Gato was screaming something unintelligible, and was barely even audible from Naruto's distance. It didn't take long for him to get drowned out by the most devastating force of nature that Naruto would ever get to bear witness to. With a shudder, the entire nation seemed to seize; the tide lowered enough that Naruto could tell a difference from his distance, and then...then, it split into thirds, with each piece capsizing as it sank beneath the sea.

The effect was nearly immediate, a massive sinkhole draining water from all sides as the newfound cavern sought to fill itself. With speed being the only attribute that would allow him to survive, he made the yacht sail faster, until he couldn't point out where the eradicated island had been located. From there, he raced off into the night, looking to the sky as his means of guidance; while the night was partly cloudy, it was just clear enough for him to make out a few of the constellations that he'd learned years ago. And, knowing where Nami no Kuni had been, he shot north. He could cut northeast in a little while, or simply go straight east if he managed to find a port with a decent map.

For now, he cut through the ocean's smooth waves. A deep sense of peace had set itself in his mind, and he'd completed his mission. It just so happened that his liberation of Nami no Kuni had inadvertently caused its annihilation.

The _Hakai_ wasn't a technique he'd learned from watching Kakashi's memories. It had been a deep rage inside of him, the desire to erase his enemies from existence. There had been too much backlash. Far too much.

Naruto resolved to never use it again.


	11. City of the Dead

**You would not believe me if I told you that I finished the first thousand words in one day, and the last thousand words in one night, but the middle thousand words took me eight months to write. Between two hurricanes, four holidays, my birthday, more shifts at work than I can care to count, and god knows how many women...time to write just got lost in translation, I guess?**

 **No excuses, though. I'm sorry for testing your patience like that. In lieu of review responses, if anybody out there was around when I first published this fic a year ago, I'd imagine you're ready to read more of it.**

 **Let's get this trainwreck moving.**

* * *

The yacht had run non-stop, at high speed, throughout the night. In the early hours of the morning, long after the sinkhole of Nami no Kuni had vanished from sight, Naruto woke up in darkness as his body rammed into the opposite wall.

"What'd we hit?" He groaned, now wide awake. Blindly fumbling his way to the door, he twisted the handle, throwing it wide to see...a cliff. It wasn't a particularly big cliff, as cliffs go. At least, as far as Naruto was aware, it wasn't a big cliff. The nose of the boat had crunched in, though, and it was very clearly taking on water. Over the immediate smells of smoke and motor oil, Naruto could almost taste the sea breeze. The sun was still low in the sky as he launched himself off of the yacht's deck with chakra, managing to get a handhold on the cliff's rough surface.

"You know," Naruto said to nobody in particular, "maybe I should have taken Kidomaru up on using that scroll."

It was a long climb. Even with the painless nature of it all, using chakra to stick after his initial grab had stayed in place, he was somewhere between bored and exhausted for the duration. After the first hour, he looked up and down, only thinking of the fact that he wasn't even halfway through with his journey. He might have guessed incorrectly about the size of the cliff.

He sped up.

Practically running on all fours, there was a certain natural grace about his movements. As his elbows tucked back against his stomach, arms preparing for new contact, his feet kicked off of the stone. As he looked down again, he was hit with the feeling of inadequacy; he'd barely progressed at all, since the last time he checked. Redoubling his efforts for a second time, and raging at the lunacy of it all, he shot up like a bullet. Twisting mid-air, even as he continued rising, he found the answer: a glowing-white matrix of Fuinjutsu that was pulling the world together differently than natural physics would allow.

Whoever he was dealing with, here, they were some clever bastards. The idea was, obviously, to tire him out before he reached the top of the cliff face. Unfortunately, they hadn't counted on his nature as a chakra-production machine. He summoned one clone, then another, and another, until enough stretched out that they nearly reached the tide. With a mighty heave, the blond sent his clones rippling forward and up. They looped through the air, a sinuous coil of artificial bodies that stretched towards a heaven that had been destroyed long ago. A shout let him know that the topmost clone had a grip on the edge. One _kawarimi_ later, and he was at the forefront of the line. His clones dispelled, their purpose fulfilled, and Naruto pulled himself up to witness a site that no mortal eyes had seen in decades.

A city built in spirals, layers and rings that his Sharingan might have known the significance of. It was a dead city—a dead nation. His nature as a ninja, and upbringing as a thief, were warning him that this was a place he shouldn't be. A place that simply should not have been here to begin with. He couldn't help himself, though...after all, he was stranded. At the very center, in this city of no movement, there was a domed building of blue glass that shone against the strengthening sunlight.

That was where he was headed, he decided. If it was important, or relevant, then it would be in the heart of the onetime city-state.

 _Who are you, that you do not know your history?_

He didn't know what spoke to him. He didn't know if he'd been spoken to. He simply understood the concepts of those words as they passed by his conscious mind.

 _Hell's time lost-son, four corpses in one grave. Long forgotten, left to waste away...a cursed child. A fractured shell, made to look whole. One whose word is binding, for himself and others._

"Who's there?" Naruto growled, one hand gripping his head...only for silence to greet him. "Alright then. Play your games."

He sprung forward, chakra launching him across a fair portion of the wasted city. As he landed silently on a rooftop, he saw the rising sun flash its light past the towering wall—enough to see that grooves had been cut into the ground below. Glittering diamonds ran across the ground in glittering veins that curled and curved in ways that could never be natural. Or, at least, Naruto _thought_ they were diamonds. He wasn't sure. How rich had this place been, that they could put diamonds in their road construction? That just seemed absurd.

He trekked across the city-state's skyline, such as it was, silent in his approach. His steps quickened as he slowed his breathing, a balancing act of Raiton and Futon chakras across his body. The utter stillness of his surroundings irked him..but as he gave more weight to the memories he'd seen of Obito and Kakashi's lives, that irritation gave way to apprehension. This place had been desolate for a long time. Longer than his own life, and probably at least twice as much. Nature hadn't reclaimed it; he was the first living thing to set foot here in decades—that thought was somewhat sobering.

Whatever had killed them could kill him, too.

 _We are not so different, you and I. Sons of the same father and mother, separated only by...a difference of degree, as it were. You will understand, soon enough._

But would he?

That shining dome called to his sense of exploration, and a thief's understanding of value; nothing mundane would be lit up like that. Especially not after all these years. The hairs on the back of Naruto's arms had raised, a feeling of goosebumps crawling from his shoulders to his scalp. He passed over broken buildings, rubble, and the telltale glint of metal that had been protected from rust by chakra. What _was_ this place? So much had been destroyed—so many bleach-white skeletons revealed by the light of the sun—but his footfalls stirred no dust. He'd escaped from the destruction of Nami no Kuni, technically AWOL; was this his karmic punishment for the death of a nation?

No wind stirred as Naruto crept forward, the all-encompassing silence briefly broken by the sound of Gato's yacht finally capsizing in the distance. It had gone to join its former owner in the unreachable fathoms below the waves; Naruto had made sure to bury him deep. Diamonds sparkled in the ground below him, and Naruto had to resist every urge he'd learned in his short life to avoid ripping a fist-sized chunk out. A _fraction_ of all that gemstone could land him a wealthy retirement, keeping Ayame and the rest of his crew cared for until they died.

The thought of his forged-in-fire family shook Naruto from his methodical approach, the uncharacteristic happening: he slipped. As he entered the short freefall, his hands came together to perform a quick _shunshin_ that left him standing on top of a pile of rubble that had previously been a home.

Or, at least, that was Naruto's best guess. Nobody was here to let him know otherwise. Surely, it must have been a home? The surrounding buildings were all similar, and nobody would have just built all this and lived somewhere else...but those would be questions for another time.

The blond watched in horrified fascination as the stone he'd swapped places with was melted down and consumed by the purest chakra he'd ever felt. And yet, at the same time, there was a deep evil to its nature. A perfect mix of light and dark, a living vessel of destruction. One that Naruto would know outrivaled him, if he looked inside himself to see it. He refused that denial of strength.

* * *

 _The serenity of the forest was something that Naruto had been used to for a long time. Even before his arrival in the City of the Dead, animals incapable of overcoming their base instincts had fled his immediate surroundings. A side-effect of his existence._

 _A side-effect of his own time-lost actions, long before his birth. A gift that was not—that had never been, like the shadow of a ghost who haunted the hollows of a world left behind. He took pride in the hand he'd played, after the way it had been dealt to him. He took pride in the knowledge that he always kept his word._

 _Subconsciously, humans directed their travel around him. It was nothing new to him, and they had no idea what caused them to do it; their own spur-of-the-moment decision, they might tell themselves. Their minds would never be able to comprehend the true answer. It wasn't that he exuded an aura of fear...if anything, he was more welcoming than any of the demons who'd managed to continue their existence after the destruction of Makai. If somebody wasn't aware of him, or didn't recognize the aura of his presence, they would act like any other animal, and do their best to leave him be. Only the strongest wills would be able to resist that urge._

 _Naruto was thankful for the peace. It gave him time to think. Naruto didn't wonder exactly how much he'd changed in the years since his departure._

 _Yuurei knew the horrors that lurked in the realm beyond the spoken word._

 _Yuurei was thankful they hadn't seen fit to rip his lungs out from his chest._

* * *

The dome had been difficult to get inside without touching the homicidal diamond veins, but Naruto had managed. Standing on bare stone, he saw something that he hadn't been prepared for: sitting down on a throne of the very same diamonds he'd avoided was a man who resembled him.

 **"At last, you've arrived. I was beginning to worry that I was wrong."** He said.

Spiky blond hair traveled past his shoulders, and his eyes were a ring-filled lilac instead of Naruto's own natural red...but he would recognize his own whisker-marks anywhere.

"Who are you? Wait..no. _What_ are you?"

 **"I'm you, and yet not. I'm a clone."** The enthroned man said.

"A...clone?"

 **"Made solid, a physical presence made permanent. Because you...or, rather, I, mixed the energy of humans, gods, and demons. You and I are different kinds of demons, however. I am...a god-killer. A destroyer. A purveyor of death. Remnants of an old guard, left behind with the express purpose of finding you."**

"And I'm..."

 **"The keeper of the laws, as decided by the gods. The reason my world fell into chaos was because the Oathkeeper died, and a new one wasn't left to take their place. But you...something changed, the night you were born. Your father tried to make you a Jinchuriki, a human with a demon sealed inside of them, but...something went wrong. I don't know what it was. I haven't left this city in ten thousand years. I do know, though, that you were supposed to have a giant demon fox sealed in your gut. Either Minato used too much force when he fought, or something complicated the birth, or...no, I won't bother with hypotheticals. Technically, you _are_ a demon trapped inside a mortal body, which works more to your benefit."**

"What?" Naruto asked.

He hated sounding unintelligent. It was a consequence of being older than the rest of his graduating class—the natural assumption for the first years of his schooling was that he had failed twice already. He hadn't taken it upon himself to prove them wrong, given that his days had consisted of absolute boredom before Mizuki had made the deal to train him, but...this was so far beyond his realm of experience, he couldn't help his questioning.

 **"You are this world's Oathkeeper. Anyone who makes a promise, swears an oath, or otherwise gives their word to you will be forced to keep it. But the same is true of you. Anything you say you'll do, you _must,_ or else you'll meet the same fate as those who fail to keep their promises to you."**

Naruto had watched what happened to Mizuki on the night he took the Kinjutsu Scroll.

"And why does a human body benefit me?" That was, without a doubt, the most puzzling thing about this series of monologues. Unbidden, Naruto raised a hand to his throat. Feeling those lines of scarred, off-color skin, Naruto really had to wonder: why was his ability to die an advantage?

 **"Demons grow by killing their enemies. Humans grow by training their minds and bodies. You, who are both..."**

"Can do both. Is that what the lights signify when I kill someone?"

 **"More or less. One of the pitfalls of your current state is that you can't absorb the full scope of your enemies' abilities after you kill them—which means that if you want to kill me, you'll need to wait until you've burned away your mortal shackles to receive all the benefits. Not that I know how many there will be! I'm just a clone, after all. I haven't spoken to anybody since before this city fell into ruin. I promise, I don't normally ramble this much."**

"Then teach me, if you're going to take up all of your time like this." Naruto replied, half expectant and half dismissive. "I don't care what."

The sitting man laughed.

 **"You're hungrier for knowledge than I was."** He grinned. **"Be careful. The pursuit of wealth has led more good men to ruin than I could count in a thousand lifetimes...but I wasn't left here to abandon you when you finally came to me. Sit down—the first thing I'm going to teach you is _stillness._ "**

* * *

It had been a terrible week, Sasuke decided. No...a terrible _series_ of weeks. Team Seven had set out on their first and only C-rank mission, their sensei had been killed and Naruto had been presumed KIA buying time for his teammates' escape. He and Sai had been put on a new team with some girl named Ayame, they'd trained together for two months before their new sensei had registered them for the Chunin Exams, and he got his ass beat by a knockoff Bruce Lee. Badly.

After barely passing the first exam, thanks _entirely_ to the fact that Ayame got scared into not even taking her test—thanks to her utter lack of stealth—they'd been thrown into the Forest of Death by a crazy sadomasochistic slut. All their food had been stolen two days ago, their water ran out yesterday night, and now? Now?

Now they were being attacked by a pedophile wearing a Kusagakure headband.

Things had, in fact, gone belly-up quite some time ago. Now would be the exact time to start considering an early retirement and marrying some rich civilian woman...if he were a coward.

Instead, his hands came together to form a series of hand seals. A wall of mud came up to shield him from sight as Sai ran backwards, brush flying furiously across his scroll canvas. And Ayame... _ghost-stepped._

It was the term they'd come up with for her particular conjunction of the "Academy Four" jutsu. She created several basic clones, used a _henge_ to disguise herself as a poorly-made clone, and launched a shuriken in an arc that even an academy student could hit blindfolded—except that she missed it, on purpose, before using a _kawarimi_ to strike and a _shunshin_ to escape. It would only work once, maybe twice if she got lucky, but it would be worth it if she could create an opening for her teammates to strike with.

As Sasuke's _Doheki_ fell, Ayame's kunai cut into their attacker's gut from behind, slicing deep into a kidney. But before she could pull away, snakes erupted from the wound, twisting with one another as they ran up her arm. As a rainbow of scales enveloped her, up to the shoulder, four kunai shot from her assailant's hands, and a sword launched from his mouth. The sword pierced through Sai's ink tiger, while the kunai pinned him to the ground with Sasuke.

"Ah...I would love to take you two for myself, but I think there might be some issues if I gave you my blessings. So I suppose, instead, I'll have to give your dear friend a parting gift."

The Kusa-nin's head rotated a hundred and eighty degrees, vertebrae snapping as he stared Ayame directly in her eyes. His mouth opened wide, neck extending before his fangs closed in on her helpless collarbone, and she knew nothing but darkness in the seconds that followed.

"What did you do to her?" Sai yelled, heaving himself forward with enough force that the kunai pinning him were rendered useless.

It was the first time Sasuke had seen his teammate mad. The first time he'd seen Sai display _any_ emotion.

"When your village and its methods aren't enough for her...she'll come to seek me out." The snakes retreated inside of the Kusa-nin as he pulled his head away. His back didn't even show a sign of injury as Ayame fell to the ground, nearly lifeless. "I hope that you can survive the rest of the exam!"

And just like that, he was gone, seeming to melt into the ground as he disappeared.


End file.
